Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/189

 those mad beseeching eyes. His tongue was dry in his throat. Yes, he was afraid, more utterly afraid than he would have fancied it possible for a grown man ever to be....

The door opened. Crispin appeared holding in his hand a lighted candle.

"Now, let us go down," he said quietly.

The relief was so great that Harkness began to babble, "You have no idea... the trouble I am causing you.... At this late hour.... What must you think...?"

The young man said nothing. Harkness meekly followed, the candle-light splashing the walls and floor with its wavering shadows. Their heads were gigantic on the faded wall-paper, and Harkness had a sudden fancy that the shadows here were the realities and he a mist. The younger Crispin gave that sense of unreality.

A kind of weariness went with him as though he were the personification of a strangled yawn. And yet beneath the weariness and indifference there was a flame burning. One realised it in that strange absorbed stare of the eyes, in a kind of determination in the movements, in a concentrated indifference to any motive of life but the intended one. Harkness was to realise this with a start of alarmed surprise when, once more in the long shabby room lit only by the light of one uncertain candle, young