Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/312

 face and at last, breathless, with the sharp corner ef his upturned collar digging into his chin, he pulled the bell of the old grey remorseless door that he knew so well. There was no one in Bennett Square, only the two lamps dimly marked its desolation.

The door was opened by Mrs. Brockett herself and she stood there, stern and black peering into his face.

“What is it? What do you want?” she asked grimly.

He brushed past her laughing and stood back under the gas in the hall looking at her.

She gave a little cry. “No! It can't be! Why, Mr. Westcott!”

He had never, in all the seven years that he had been with her, seen her so strongly moved.

“But Mr. Westcott! To think of it! And the times we've talked of you! And you never coming near us all this while. You might have been dead for all we knew, and indeed if it hadn't been for Miss Monogue the other day we'd have heard no news since the day that wild man with the beard came walking in,” she broke off suddenly—“and there you are, holding your umbrella with the point down and making a great pool on the carpet as though—” She took the umbrella from him but her hand rested for an instant on his arm and she said gruffly—

“But all the same, Mr. Peter, I'm more glad to see you than I can say—” She took him into her little room and looked at him. “But you've not changed in the least,” she said, “not in the very least. And where, pray, Mr. Peter, have you been all this time and come nowhere near us?”

He tried to explain; he was confused, he said something about marriage and stopped. The room was filled with that subtle odour that brought his other life back to him in a torrent. He was bathed in it, overwhelmed by it—roast-beef, mutton, blacking, oil-cloth, decayed flowers, geraniums, damp stone, bread being toasted—all these things were in it.

He filled his nostrils with the delicious pathos and intimacy of it.

She regarded him sternly. “Now, Mr. Peter, it's of no use. Oh, yes, we've heard about your wedding. You wrote