"Hadn't you heard——?"
"How should I? Look here, doctor, I haven't been sulking in civilization; racketing in cities. I've been roughing it, going up and down in the earth.—There wasn't much use in writing letters. I told my mother I would turn up again some day, and she wasn't to be surprised. I did send her a line, now and then, the last of them a greasy scrawl in a mining camp, where there was one bit of paper among the lot of us, and I won it. She can't have got that.... When I had worked the restlessness out of my blood—some fellows can't manage that, it takes them all their lives—I had a fancy to come home and walk into the old place as if I had never left it.... It's simple enough——!"
He was bending forward, stammering a little in his excitement. Suddenly he laughed.
"By George!" he said. "So that was why the porters fled from me at John o' Gaunt!"
The old man surveyed him anxiously, wiping his glasses.
Often one heard of men who, seized by a thirst for adventure in the rough, or unbalanced by passion and disappointment, had thrown up everything familiar and dropped out, to savour the hard realities of life. Sometimes they reappeared, sometimes only peculiar stories drifted to their old set about them, and those who might know were dumb. He felt a most irrational alarm, an impulse to hold fast to this prodigal.
"You'll not vanish again?" he said hastily. "You won't want to roam in search of adventures now you have a wife to take care of."
Barnaby stretched out for a cigarette and lit it. There had always been a box of them in one corner of the chimney-piece. It did not strike him as odd that he should find them there.
"Have a smoke, doctor," he said. "It'll steady your nerves a bit.... Yes, I'm sobered."
He halted a minute, and the terrier at his feet, remembering an old trick he had taught her, sprang up and blew out the match. As he stooped to caress her, she began licking him furiously. There had been some other trick, but she had forgotten that. She made a clumsy effort to keep his attention by crossing her paws and waving them, which was how it had begun....