"O, yes. They're all charged now."
"Well, I must leave you for a little while. You will be good boys when I am away. Take care of yourselves."
"O, yes!"
"And, Freddie, you will teach Frank to be a good boy?"
"Oh, yes, I'll teach him that, too! But I must have a book."
"Must have a book? You don't mean to say you know how to read?"
"No, but the way to be a good boy is to sit down on a chair at a table and look at pictures in a book. I hate books. Frank, it's Noah's ark now and we're the beasts."
The man moved away, and entered the cottage. He felt elated to an extraordinary degree.
For more than two years he had been dwelling alone with blighting memories. Yesterday and to-day he was experiencing sensations. Something was now entering his life. Formerly everything had been going out, going out from a life already empty.
That day he had been confused and put out by so simple a thing as that girl's invitation to spend an hour in a house not a hundred yards from his own. It was the first invitation of the kind he had received since his voluntary exile from the world. The world had been dead to him. He had almost forgotten there was such a state of existence as that in which ordinary people live. All his own experience seemed no more real than the memory of a dream, out of which the light and colour were fading slowly but surely.