The unhappiness
that had been gradually growing about him since his last term at Dawson's,
was now all about him with the strength and horrible appearance of some
unholy giant. It was indeed with some consciousness of Things that were
flinging their shadows on the horizon and were not as yet fully visible
to him that he sat there. That evening at Stephen's farm, realised only
faintly at the time, hung before him now as a vivid induction or prologue
to the later terrors. He was doomed--so he felt in that darkened and
mysterious room--to a terrible time and horrors were creeping upon him from
every side. "Clack-clack" went his grandfather beneath the rugs, as the
cactus plant rattled in the window and the silence through the stairs and
passages of the house crept in folds about the room.
Peter shivered; the coals fell from a dull gold into grey and crumbling
ashes. He shut everything in the surrounding world from his mind and
thought of his dead mother. There indeed there was strangeness enough, for
it seemed now that that wonderful afternoon had filled also all the earlier
years of his life. It seemed to him now that there had never been a time
when he had not known her and talked with her, and yet with this was also
a consciousness of all the joys that he had missed because he had not
known her before. As he thought of it the hard irretrievable fact of
those earlier empty years struck him physically with a sharp agonising
pain--toothache, and no possible way of healing it.
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