Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/209

 He wanted to ask her whether she had seen Miss Rossiter but had not the courage. A little misty rain made feathery noises against the window-pane.

“Well, I must go down to the shop,” he said, finding his umbrella in the hall.

“I think it's superb,” she said, referring back to the book. “You won't be having to go down to the shop much longer.”

It was really surprising that he cared so little. He banged the door behind him and did not see her eyes as she watched him go.

Processions be damned! He wished that the wet, shining street were not so strangely like the sea-road at Treliss, and that the omnibuses at a distance did not murmur like the sea. People, black and funereal, were filling stands down Oxford Street; soldiers were already lining the way, the music of bands could be heard some streets away.

He was in a thoroughly bad temper and scowled at the people who passed him. He hated Royal Processions, he hated the bookshop, he hated all his friends and he wished that he were dead. Here he had been seven years, he reflected, and nothing had been done. Where was his city paved with gold? Where his Fame, where his Glory?

He even found himself envying those old Treliss days. There at any rate things had happened. There had been an air, a spirit. Fighting his father—or at any rate, escaping from his father—had been something vital. And here he was now, an ill-tempered, useless youth, earning two pounds a week, in love with some one who was scarcely conscious of his existence. He cursed the futility of it all.

And so fuming, he crossed the threshold of the bookshop, and, unwitting, heedless, left for ever behind him the first period of his history.

“Programme of the Royal Procession,” a man was shouting—“Coloured 'Andkerchief with Programme of Royal Procession—”

Peter, stepping into the dark shop, was conscious of Mr. Zanti's white face and that behind him was standing Stephen.

At the sight of their faces, of their motionless bodies