"Perhaps I shall."
"I hope to God you will—and now, dear, it's dreadfully late, and you're tired. Hadn't you better go to bed?"
He turned to her impulsively.
"You'll stick to me, you and Len?—whatever I'm like—even—even if I'm not quite the same as I used to be."
Strange to say, her impression of him was of an infinite childishness. She realised with a pang that while for the last three years she and Leonard had been growing older in their contact with a world of love and sorrow, this boy, in spite of all he had suffered, had merely been shut up with a few rules and habits. In many ways he was younger than when he first went to gaol, more ignorant and more childish—he had lost his grip of life. In other ways he was terribly, horribly older.
She put her arms around his neck, and kissed this pathetic old child, this poor childish old man.
CHAPTER II SHOVELSTRODE
A row of lights gleamed from Shovelstrode Manor, on the north slope of Ashdown Forest. Shovelstrode was in Sussex, and looked straight over the woods into Surrey and Kent. Round it the pines heaped up till they gave a ragged edge to the hill behind it. Into the house they cast many shadows, and even when at night they were curtained out of the lighted rooms, one could hear them rustling and thrumming a strange tune.