Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/203

 stirred, both of them. The lamps were coming out down Oxford Street, a pale saffron sky outlined the dark bulk of the Church that is opposite Mudie's shop and stands back from the street, a little as though it wondered at all the noise and clamour, a limpid and watery blue still lingered, wavering, in the evening sky.

They turned into an A.B.C. shop and ordered glasses of milk and they sat and looked at one another. They had altered remarkably little and to both of them, although the roar of the Oxford Street traffic was outside the window, it might have been, easily enough, that a clanging bell would soon summon them back to ink-stained desks and Latin exercises.

“Why, in heaven's name, did you ever get out of my sight so completely? I wrote to Treliss again and again but I don't suppose anything was forwarded.”

“They don't know where I am.”

“But why did you never write to me?”

“Why should I? I wanted to do something first—to show you—”

“What rot! Is that friendship? I call that the most selfish thing I've ever known.” No, obviously enough, Bobby could never understand that kind of thing. With him, once a friend always a friend, that is what life is for. With Peter, once an adventure always an adventure—that is what life is for—but as soon as a friend ceases to be an adventure, why then—

But Bobby had not ceased to be an adventure. He was, as he sat there, more of one than he had ever been before.

“What have you been doing all these years?”

“Been in a bookshop.”

“In a bookshop?”

“Yes, selling second-hand books.”

“What else?”

“Oh reading a lot seeing one or two people  and some music.” Peter was vague; what after all had he been doing?

Bobby looked at him tenderly and affectionately, “You want seeing after—you look fierce, as you used to when you'd been having a bad time at school. The day they all hissed you.”