Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/463

 him. That she should care so much for any one so worthless, so fruitless as he had proved himself to be!

He had come to her with some dim sense that it was kind of him to visit her; he advanced to her now across the room with a consciousness that she was honouring him by receiving him at all.

That joy, with which she had at first greeted him, had in it also something of surprise. He had forgotten how greatly these last terrible days must have altered his appearance—he told much more than he knew, and the little sad attempt that he made, as he came to her, to present as careless and happy an appearance as he had presented in the old Brockett days was more pathetic and betraying than anything he could have done.

But she just closed both her burning hands about his cold one, made him sit down in a chair by her side and, trembling with the excited joy of having him with her, forced him to determine that, whatever came of it, he would keep his troubles from her, would let her know nothing of his old chuckling father and the shadowy welcome that Scaw House had flung over him, would be still the Peter that he had been when he had seen her last in London.

“Peter! How splendid to have you here! When Mr. Bannister told me last night I could have cried for happiness, and he, dear little man, was surely as pleased to see me happy as though I'd been his own sister.”

“I'd just come down—”Peter began, trying to smile and conscious with an alarm that surprised him, of her fragility and the way that her hand went now and again to her breast, as though to relieve some pain there. “Are 'you sure—” he broke off, “that I'm not doing yon harm coming like this—not agitating you too much, not exciting you?”

“Harm! Why, Peter,” she was smiling but he noticed too that her eyes were searching his face, as though to find some clue to the change that they saw there—“Why it's all the good in the world. It's what I've been wanting all this time. Some change, a little excitement, for I've been here, you know, quite a number of weeks alone—and that it should be you—you! of all people in this lovely exciting surprising world.”