Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/255

 We chatted like that for what I suppose was something more than half-an-hour, while we looked out upon the seething multitude in the street below, when suddenly the boy's mask fell from him, so abruptly, and with such a naked revelation of a soul in anguish, that concealment was impossible.

I saw him lean forward with his elbows on the window-sill and his hands clenching an iron bar. His face had become like his shirt front, almost as white as that. A kind of groan came from him, like that of a man badly wounded. The people on either side of him turned to look at him, but he was unconscious of them, as he stared at something in the street. I followed the direction of his eyes and guessed that he was looking at a motor-car which had been stopped by the crowd who were surging about it. It was an open car and inside were a young man and woman in fancy-dress as Pierrot and Columbine. They were standing up and pelting the crowd with long coloured streamers, which the mob caught, and tossed back again, with shouts of laughter. The girl was very pretty, with an audacious little face beneath the white sugar-loaf cap, and her eyes were on fire. Her companion was a merry-eyed fellow, clean-shaven and ruddy-faced (for he had not chalked it to Pierrot's whiteness), and looked to me typical of a naval officer or one of our young air men. I could see nothing to groan about in such a sight.

"What's wrong, Harding?"

I touched him on the elbow, for I did not like him to give himself away before the other company in the window-seat.

He rose at once, and walked, in a stumbling way, across the room, while I followed. The room was empty where we stood.

"Aren't you well?" I asked.