He could see it in her eyes, her beautiful grey eyes that moved
him so curiously. There were days when he was on the edge of a rush of
questions, and then something held him back--perhaps the unconscious
certainty that his mother's answers would precipitate his relations with
his father--and he was not, as yet, ready.
Anyhow a grim place, Scaw House, grimmer with every return to it, and
not a brightly coloured interlude to Dawson's, grim enough in its own
conditions. The silence that was gradually growing with Peter--the fixed
assurance, whether at home or at school, that life was easier if one said
nothing--might have found an outlet in Stephen's company, but here again
there was no cheerful chronicle.
Each holiday showed Peter less of Stephen than the last had done, and he
was afraid to ask himself why this was. Perhaps in reality he did not know,
but at any rate he was sure that the change was in Stephen. He cared for
Stephen as devotedly as ever, and, indeed, in that perhaps he needed him
more than ever and saw him so little, his affection was even stronger than
it had been. But Stephen had changed, not, Peter knew, in any affection
towards himself, but in his own habits and person. Burstead--his old
enemy--had taken a farm near his own farm, in order, so they said at The
Bending Mule, that he might flaunt Mrs.
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