Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/306

 “Well, you never know with these trains—and a honeymoon, too, is always rather a dangerous time. I remember—”

“I hear them!” Alice cried and there indeed they were to he heard bumping and banging in the little hall. The door opened and Peter and Clare, radiant with happiness, appeared.

They stood in the doorway, side by side, Clare in a little white hat and grey travelling dress and Peter browner and stronger and squarer than ever.

All these people filled the little room. There was a crackling fire of conversation.

“Oh! but we've had a splendid time—”

“No, I don't think Clare's in the least tired—”

“Yes, isn't the house a duck?”

“Don't we just love being back!”

“ hoping you hadn't caught colds—”

“ besides we had the easiest crossing—”

“ How's Bobby?”

“ were so afraid that something must have happened—”

Mrs. Rossiter took Clare upstairs to help her to take her hat off.

Mother and daughter faced one another—Clare flung herself into her mother's arms.

“Oh! Mother dear, he's wonderful, wonderful!”

Downstairs Alice watched Peter critically. She had not realised until this marriage, how fond she had grown of Peter. She had, for him, very much the feeling that Bobby had—a sense of tolerance and even indulgence for all tempers and morosities and morbidities. She had seen him, on a day, like a boy of eighteen, loving the world and everything in it, having, too, a curious inexperience of the things that life might mean to people, unable, apparently, to see the sterner side of life at all—and then suddenly that had gone and given place to a mood in which no one could help him, nothing could cheer him like Saul, he was possessed with Spirits.

Now, as he stood there, he looked not a day more than eighteen. Happiness filled him with colour—his eyes were shining—his mouth smiling.