Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/355

 I think you might come out with me just this afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you” He did not believe that she had ever really finished “The Stone House.” She pretended that she had—“the end was simply perfect,” but she was vague, nebulous. He found the marker in her copy, some fifty pages before the end.

She was so easily impressed by every one whom she met that perhaps the laughing attitude of Cards to Peter's books had something to do with it all. Cards affected to despise anything to do with work, here to-day, gone to-morrow—let us eat and drink dear old Peter, grubbing away upstairs—“I say, Mrs. Westcott, let's go and rag him” And then they had come and invaded his room at the top of the house, and sometimes he had been glad and had flung his work down as though it were of no account  and then afterwards, in the middle of some tea-party he had been suddenly ashamed, deeply, bitterly ashamed, as though he had actually wounded those white pages lying up there in his quiet room.

He was at this time, like a man jostled and pushed and turned about at some riotous fair; looking, now this way, now that, absorbed by a thousand sights, a thousand sounds—and always through it all feeling, bitterly in his heart, that something dear to him, somewhere in some place of silence, was dying—

Well, hang it all, at any rate there was the Child!

At any rate there was the Child!

And what a child! Did any one ever have a baby like it, so fat and round and white, with its head already covered with faint golden silk, its eyes grey and wondering—with its sudden gravities, its amazing joys and terrific humour, the beauty of its stepping away, as it did, suddenly without any warning, behind a myriad mists and curtains, into some other land that it knew of. How amazing to watch it as it slowly forgot all the things that it had come into the world remembering, as it slowly realised all the laws that this new order of things demanded of its obedience. Could any one who had been present ever forget