“I can’t stop,” said Colin, sitting down. “It’s fearfully late and you’re a villain for being awake.”
“All right: I’m a villain,” said Dennis.
“And you wait for me every night?” asked Colin.
Dennis nodded. Just then he could not trust himself to speak, but his shining eyes spoke for him.
“What shall we talk about,” asked Colin, “just for a minute?”
“Oh anything: it doesn’t matter a bit, as long as it’s you.”
At that moment Colin was happy. But he had hardly realized that, before, just as he had heard the night-wind coming up and whispering in the trees by the lake, he knew that there was approaching the blast of hate and evil which he had tried to conjure up in the chapel. He leant towards Dennis, put his arm round his neck and kissed him.
“Good night, old boy,” he said. “I won’t stop now. Sleep well.”
“Ever so well,” said Dennis.
Colin clicked out the light, and went to his room. Already his brain seethed with images of evil, vivid and alluring, and fierce at this treason of his. They swarmed like a loyal garrison to that breach in his defences where Dennis had stood, and drove him off. They urged Colin to pursue, to go back to the boy’s room, to let loose on him their assault, to defile and desecrate his innocence, to show him the ecstasy of evil, the charm of cruelty. What matter if panic or horror made nightmare round him? He would wake from them with new currents coursing in his veins, new desires stinging him to their fulfilment. Where was the good of his being heir to the legend if he did not enter into his birthright?