Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/208

 He had tossed about in his bed, and then left it, for it was too hot to go to sleep. He had no idea the house was so tall as it seemed to-night; the downward aspect from the very top landing was abysmal. He crept down; and down again a little further; no stair-board creaked beneath his elfin footfall.

A rudimentary spirit of adventure which attended his setting-out had been quenched; he called a halt; he was certainly a little frightened. Poking his head through the bannisters, he could see in the passage below a streak of light, which lay across it from the dining-room door ajar; but there was no sound. Intangible fears rocked his diminutive soul, his nervous fingers were tightly interlaced, he was heroically nerving himself to meet calamity.

It was a long, long time; but at last there came the noise of chair legs scraping over a Brussels carpet.

His grown-up sister, then, was still alive, and presumably safe, for presently there floated up to him, a little out of tune, a few bars of a then fashionable song.

He moved down another flight of stairs, with an apprehension that she perhaps was feeling solitary. She had begun to work the sewing-machine, and its dull whirling, which seems always laden with the weariness of a thousand women's lives, was a harsh accompaniment to his tragic thoughts.

A little dread was mixed with his admiration for his grown-up sister. She was so upright and trim, the colour in her cheeks was clear and bright, and there was a dimple in her chin; but her grey eyes always smiled above and beyond, and not at him, and this never quite compensated for her indulgence at teatime, when she would sometimes only laugh when she saw him surreptitiously eating the forbidden combination of butter and jam. Even in after-life he only partially realised what an entire sacrifice his sister's life had been to him and to his elder brothers. If the slender