Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/29

 the great door swung slowly open, and he saw her, as he had pictured it, with a candle in her hand raised above her head, peering into the dark.

“Oh! it's you, Master Peter,” and she stood aside, without another word, to let him in. He slipped past her, silently, into the hall and, after a second's pause, she followed him in, banging the hall door behind her. Then she opened the dining-room door announcing, grimly, “It's Master Peter come in, sir.” The marble clock struck half-past ten as she spoke.

He stood just inside the doer blinking a little at the sudden light and twisting his cloth cap round and round in his hands. He couldn't see anything at first, and he could not collect his thoughts. At last he said, in a very little voice:

“I've come back, father.”

The lights settled before his eyes, and he saw them all exactly as he had thought they would be. His father had not looked up from his paper, and Peter could see the round bald patch on the top of his head. Aunt Jessie was talking to herself about her cards in a very agitated whisper—“Now it's the King I want—how provoking! Ah, there's the seven of spades, and the six and the five—oh dear! it's a club,” and not looking up at all.

No one answered his remark, and the silence was broken by his grandfather waking up; a shrill piping voice came from out of the rugs. “Oh! dear, what a doze I've had! It must be eight o'clock! What a doze for an old man to have! on such a cold night too,” and then fell asleep again immediately.

At last Peter spoke again in a voice that seemed to come from quite another person.

"Father—I've come back!”

His father very slowly put down his newspaper and looked at him as though he were conscious of him for the first time. When he spoke it was as though his voice came out of the ceiling or the floor because his face did not seem to move at all.

“Where have you been?”

“In the town, father.”

"Come here.”