Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/42

 It stayed, trembling with a kind of personal invitation before him. Then, as though it had nodded and smiled farewell to him, it vanished. Only the wall was there.

But the excitement remained, excitement quite unaccountable.

He got up, his knees trembling. He looked at the stout bellying occupant of the other chair, his mouth open, his snores reverberant.

He went out. Six days later he was in the train for Treliss.

Now too, of course, he had his reactions just as he always had. He could explain the thing easily enough; for a moment or two he had slept, or, if he had not, a trick of light on that warm afternoon and his own thoughts about possible places had persuaded him.

Nevertheless the picture remained strangely vivid—the sea, the shore, the rising town, the little line of darkening wood. He would go down there, and on the day that Maradick had suggested to him. Something might occur. You never could tell. He packed his etchings—his St. Gilles, Marais, his Flight into Egypt and Orvieto, his Whistler and Strang and Meryon. They would protect him and see that he did nothing foolish.