Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/252

 Peter had said that he would never speak to him again should he do such a thing. He had said that should he once obtain an independent position then he would go back but not before.

Stephen did not know what to do nor where to go. In another month's time the rent could not be paid and then they must go into the street and Peter was in no condition for that—he should rather be in bed. Mrs. Williams, it is true, would not be hard upon them, for she was a kind woman and had formed a great liking for Peter, but she had only enough herself to keep her family alive and she must, for her children's sake, let the room.

To Stephen, puzzling in vain and going round and round in a hopeless circle, it seemed as though Peter's brains were locked in an iron box and they could not find a key. For himself, well, it was natural enough! But Peter, with that genius, that no one should want him!

And yet through it all, at the back of the misery and distress of it, there was a wild pride, a fierce joy that he had the key with him, that he was all in the world to whom the boy might look, that to him and to him alone, in this wild, cold world Peter now belonged.

It was his moment

At the end of a terrible day of disastrous rejections Peter, stumbling down the Strand, was conscious of a little public-house, with a neat bow-window, that stood back from the street. At the bottom of his trouser pocket a tiny three-penny piece that Stephen had, that morning, thrust upon him, turned round and round in his fingers. He had not spent it—he had intended to restore it to Stephen in the evening. He had meant, too, to walk back all the way to Bucket Lane but now he felt that he could not do that unless he were first to take something. This little inn with its bow-windows Down the Strand in the light of the setting sun, he saw again that which he had often seen during these last weeks—that chain of gaunt figures that moved with bending backs and twisted fingers, on and out of the crowds and the carriages—The beggars! He