Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/315

 Peter gave him a long kiss and left him. Supposing, one day, he had a boy like that? A little boy in a shirt like that? Wouldn't it be simply too wonderful? A boy to give soldiers to

He went across to Miss Monogue's door. A faint voice answered his knock and, entering the room, the scent of medicine and flowers that he always connected with his mother, met him. Norah Monogue, very white, with dark shadows beneath her eyes, was lying on the sofa by the fire.

Mrs. Brockett had prepared her for Peter's coming and she smiled up at him with her old smile and gave him her hand. How thin and white it was with its long slender fingers! He sat down by her sofa and he knew by the way that she looked at him that she was reproaching him—

“Naughty Peter,” she said, “all these months and you have been nowhere near us.”

“I, too, have a bone—you never sent me a word about my wedding.”

She turned her head away. “I was frightfully ill just then. They didn't think I'd pull through. I did write afterwards to Clare, I told her how ill I'd been—”

“She never told me.”

Peter bent over the sofa. “But I am ashamed, Norah, more ashamed than I can say. After I got well and went to live with the Galleons a new life seemed to begin for me and I was so eager and excited about it all. And then—” he hesitated for a moment—“there was Clare.”

“Yes, I know there was Clare and I am so delighted about it—I know that you will both be so happy But, when one is lying here week after week and is worried and tired things take such a different outline. I thought that you and Clare—that you had given me up altogether and—”

Suddenly hiding her face in her hands she began to cry. It was inexpressibly desolate there in the dim bare little room, and the sharp sense of his neglect and the remembrance of the good friend that she had been to him for so many years overwhelmed Peter.

He knelt down and put his arms round her. “Norah—don't, please, I can't bear it. It's all right. I've been a