Some couple of hours later the two, with Democritus, were in the train, sitting in a first-class carriage, which Tommy had bribed the guard to reserve to their sole use. Neither man desired the company of strangers at the moment. Under all their chaff and light-heartedness there was a sense of bigness, a feeling of something great accomplished.
Peter gazed through the carriage window at the snow-covered landscape, his mind a whirl of varied emotions. It is useless to attempt to say which was uppermost. Kaleidoscopic they revolved in his brain, a jumble of pleasure, relief, half-forgotten fatigue, expectation, though now through them all ran a thought of regret, of sadness—the thought of Anne.
Is ever the perfection of joy allowed to us mortals? It would appear not, mused Peter. Here was everything to his hand that his soul could desire, save the one thing after which it really hankered; and with that to his debit, the [Pg 301]balance—in spite of its appearance—was distinctly inadequate.
Tommy, gazing at him furtively from behind the morning paper, marvelled at the sudden melancholy of the man. Cogitating in his mind for the reason, and having heard from Muriel of Peter’s previous engagement, he thought to have found it. If only, so meditated Tommy—no lover of Millicent—he could realize the escape he had had.
And so the train bore them onward, out of the snow-covered land, past bare brown fields and skeleton trees, past smoky towns and small villages lying in pale sunlight, on to the suburbs past whose platforms the train roared and rushed, on and ever onward, till London itself was reached.
CHAPTER XXXI
DEMOCRITUS ARRIVES TO STAY
General Carden in his smoking-room was listening, waiting. Fifty times already in the last half-hour he had looked over the curtain that veiled the lower half of the window. Fifty times he had looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and compared it with his watch.
An orange envelope lay on the table beside him, and with it a strip of pink paper. He knew the words thereon verbatim; certainly they were few in number: