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