“Going to bed, father?”
Again Darius shook his head. He then went slowly into the drawing-room and lit the gas there.
“What shall you do? Leave him?” Maggie whispered to Edwin in the dining-room, as she helped Mrs Nixon to clear the table.
“I don’t know,” said Edwin. “I shall see.”
In ten minutes both Maggie and Mrs Nixon had gone to bed. Edwin hesitated in the dining-room. Then he extinguished the gas there, and went into the drawing-room. Darius, not having lowered the blinds, was gazing out of the black window.
“You needn’t wait down here for me,” said he, a little sharply. And his tone was so sane, controlled, firm, and ordinary that Edwin could do nothing but submit to it.
“I’m not going to,” he answered quietly.
Impossible to treat a man of such demeanour like a child.