"Play with me," he said, plaintively.
"Play with you! I'll stand you on your head instead," said Leonard, and put his arm around Marjorie.
But Herbert continued to call to the emptiness.
Leonard and Marjorie paused on the landing, and he reached up and spread his hand over the face of the clock.
"Stop moving!" he said.
"You're just about three years old to-night," said Marjorie.
"I know—I know," he said. Suddenly, with an impulse and gesture of childlike and terrible longing, he put both his arms about Marjorie. His face wore an expression that she could never forget. Looking up at him with wide, tearless eyes, she felt in that one uncontrolled moment that she knew him better than she ever would again. She felt wonderfully old, immeasurably older than Leonard, older than the whole world. With a love almost impersonal in its unconscious motherliness, she yearned with the mighty power of her woman's body and soul to protect this immature and inarticulate being who was faring forth to the peninsula of the "Dead English" to make his silent sacrifice. The great house seemed to be listening, hushed, to the sober ticking of the clock on the landing. Suddenly, with a preliminary shudder, its melodious voice rang out nine times. The two stole downstairs to the dining-room.
"Nine o'clock. We've missed three courses," whispered Leonard to Marjorie.
All through dinner he sulked. He could not forgive his Aunt Hortense for her very considerable bulk, which was situated between him and Marjorie. He squeezed his mother's hand under the table, till her rings cut into her flesh, and she had to smile; but toward all the flattering advances of his aunt, and her effort to ascertain his opinion on every aspect of the war, he remained dumb with the maddening, imperturbability of a sulky boy, who refuses to be "pumped."
After dinner he was claimed by his father and remained in the smoking-room, detained by a certain wistfulness in his father's manner.