He had not been
disturbed--he had had other things to think about--and now he was very
greatly disturbed indeed; that was the first difference that he consciously
realised. The disturbance lay, of course, partly in the presence of his
father and in the sense that he had had growing upon him, during the last
two years, that their relationship, the one to the other, would, suddenly,
one fine day, spring into acute emotion. They were approaching one another
gradually as in a room whose walls were slowly closing. "Face to face--and
then body to body--at last, soul to soul!"
He did not, he thought, actively hate his father; his father did not
actively hate him, but hate might spring up at any moment between them, and
Peter, although he was only sixteen, was no longer a child. But the feeling
of apprehension that Scaw House gave him was caused by wider influences
than his father. Three years at Dawson's had given Peter an acute sense of
expecting things, it might be defined as "the glance over the shoulder to
see who followed"--some one was always following at Scaw House. He saw
in this how closely life was bound together, because every little moment
at Dawson's contributed to his present active fear. Dawson's explained
Scaw House to Peter. And yet this was all morbidity and Peter, square,
broad-shouldered, had no scrap of morbidity in his clean body.
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