No sign now of
that Peter--evident enough in the Brockett days--morose, silent, sometimes
oppressed by a sense of unreasoned catastrophe, stepping into his bookshop
and out again as though all the world were his enemy.
Peter knew now that he was loved. He had felt that precious quality on the
day that his mother died, he had felt it sometimes when he had been in
Stephen's company, but against these isolated emotions what a world of hate
and bitterness.
Now he felt Clare's affection on every side of him. They had already in so
short a time a store of precious memories, intimacies, that they shared.
They had been through wild, passionate wonders together and standing now,
two human beings with casual words and laughing eyes, yet they knew that
perfect holy secrets bound them together.
He stood sometimes in the little house and wondered for an instant whether
it was all true. Where were all those half cloudy dreams, those impulses,
those dread inheritances that once he had known so well? Where that other
Peter Westcott? Not here in this dear delicious little house, with Love and
Home and great raging happiness in his heart.
He wrote to Stephen, to Mr. Zanti, to Norah Monogue and told them. He
received no answers--no word from the outer world had come to him. That
other life seemed cut off, separated--closed. Perhaps it had left him for
ever! Perhaps, as Clare said, walls and fires were better than wind and
loneliness--comfort more than danger.
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