"Well, sir?" Piers raised his brows without looking up.
The old man brought down an impatient fist on the table. "Why can't you say what you think?" he demanded angrily. "You sit there with your mouth shut as if—as if—" His eyes went suddenly to the woman's face on the wall with the red lips that smiled half-sadly, half-mockingly, and the eyes that perpetually followed him but never smiled at all. "Confound you, Piers!" he said. "I sometimes think that voyage round the world did you more harm than good."
"Why, sir?" said Piers quickly.
Sir Beverley's look left the smiling, baffling face upon the wall and sought his grandson's. "You were so mad to be off the bearing-rein, weren't you?" he said. "So keen to feel your own feet? I thought it would make a man of you, but I was a fool to do it. I'd better have kept you on the rein after all."
"I should have run away if you had," said Piers. He poured himself out a glass of wine and raised it to his lips. He looked at Sir Beverley above it with a smile half-sad, half-mocking, and eyes that veiled his soul. "I should have gone to the devil if you had, sir," he said, "and—probably—I shouldn't have come back." He drank slowly, his eyes still upon Sir Beverley's face.
When he set the glass down again he was openly laughing. "Besides, you horsewhipped me for something or other, do you remember? It hurts to be horsewhipped at nineteen."
Sir Beverley growled at him inarticulately.
"Yes, I know," said Piers, "But it doesn't affect me so much now. I'm past the sensitive age." He ate his walnut, drained his glass, and rose.
"You—puppy!" said Sir Beverley, looking up at him.
Piers came to his side. He suddenly knelt down and pulled the old man's arm round his shoulders. "I say, I'm going to enjoy that trip," he said boyishly. "Let's get away before the New Year!"