her as
mischievous, saturnine, nor vindictive, and was yet faintly suggestive
of all three, Lawford quietly opened the drawing-room door and put down
the candlestick on the floor within.

'What on earth, my good man, are you fumbling after now?' came the
almost fretful question from under the echoing porch.

'Coming, coming,' said Lawford, and slammed the door behind them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The first faint streaks of dawn were silvering across the stars when
Lawford again let himself into his deserted house. He stumbled down
to the pantry and cut himself a crust of bread and cheese, and ate it,
sitting on the table, watching the leafy eastern sky through the painted
bars of the area window. He munched on, hungry and tired. His night
walk had cooled head and heart. Having obstinately refused Mr Bethany's
invitation to sleep at the Vicarage, he had sat down on an old low wall,
and watched until his light had shone out at his bedroom window. Then
he had simply wandered on, past rustling glimmering gardens, under
the great timbers of yellowing elms, hardly thinking, hardly aware
of himself except as in a far-away vision of a sluggish insignificant
creature struggling across the tossed-up crust of an old,
incomprehensible world.

The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been
that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the
direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his
breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his
eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing
he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white
drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau--they were familiar but not
very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment
in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him
wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such
a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila
with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. 'I wonder what they'll do?'
had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few
hours as had 'What am I to do?' in the first bout of his 'visitation.'

But the 'they' was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and
Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn,
and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the
verger, Mr Dutton,