Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/369

 Made heaps of money? Discovered treasure?” He pulled himself up shortly. He remembered the bookshop, the girl leaning against the door looking into the street, then the boys crying the news

If Mr. Zanti had been mixing himself up with that sort of thing again! And then the bright blue suit, the white spats, were reassuring. As if one could ever take such a child seriously about anything!

Mr. Zanti shook his head, ruefully. “No, not ezackly a fortune! There was a place I 'eard of, right up in the Basque country—'twas an old deserted garden, where zey 'ad buried treasure, centuries ago—I 'ad it quite certainly from a friend. We came up there for a time but we found nothing.” He sighed and then was instantly cheered again. “But it's all right. I've got a plan now—a wonderful plan.” He became very mysterious. “It's a certain thing—we're off to Cornwall, Mr. Brant and myself—”

“Cornwall?”

“Come too, Peter.”

“Ah! don't I wish that I could!” He suddenly saw his life, his books—everything in London holding him, tying him—“But I can't go now, my father being there makes it impossible. But in any case, I'm a family man now—you know.”

As he said the words he was conscious that, in Stephen's eyes at any rate, the family man was about the last thing that he looked. He was wondering, with intense curiosity, what were the things that Stephen was finding in him, for the things that Stephen found were most assuredly the things that he was. No one knew him as Stephen knew him. Against his will the thought of Clare came driving upon him. How little she knew him! or was it only that she knew another side of him?

But he pulled himself away from that. “Now for the nursery—Stephen Secundus. But you'll have to support me whilst I get rid of Mrs. Kant—perhaps three of us together—”

As he led the way upstairs he knew that Stephen was not entirely reassured about him.

Mrs. Kant was a large, busy woman, like a horse—a horse who dislikes other horses and sniffs an enemy in