There followed conversation.
“I like you most awfully. I like your neck and your eyes and your hair—it's stiff, like my father's. My name is Clare Elizabeth Rossiter. What's yours?”
“Peter Westcott.”
“Do you live here?”
“No—a good long way away—by the sea.”
“Oh, I'm staying at Kenwyn—my uncle lives at Kenwyn, but I live in London with father and mother and Aunt Grace—it's nice here. I think you're such a nice boy. Will you come and see father and mother in London?”
Peter smiled. It would not be the thing for some one in a bookshop to go and call on the parents of any one who could afford Crumpet and Miss Jackson, but the thought of London, the very name of it, sent his blood tingling to his face.
“Perhaps we shall meet,” he said. “I'm going to London soon.”
“Oh! are you? Oh! How nice! Then, of course, you will come to tea. Every one comes to tea.”
Crumpet, tired of the rabbit, worn out with adventure and peril, struggled into Peter's lap and slumbered with one ear lying back across his eyes. The sun slipped down upon the town and touched the black cathedral with flame, and turned the silver of the river into burning gold. On the bend of the hill against the sky came a black gaunt figure.