"My boy," he said quietly, "I ought to resent that but strangely enough I don't find myself resenting the idea of your taking strange liberties in my house. In fact, I—I had that same impulse. I nearly did that myself, just before you burst in here."
The young man looked at him in amazement.
"You were going to turn—Mrs. Montagu's picture to the wall? Wh—why, you old dirty beast!"
To Henry Montagu there was no vulgarity in the words. Their huge reproach of him drove every other quality out of them and a deep color into his face.
"But I—I quelled the impulse. And y—you would actually have done it!" he stammered.
"I had a reason and a right to!" cried the young man. "I'd never seen it before and if it repelled me I had a right never to look at it again! But she was your wife!"
Once more he stood, his eyes avoiding the portrait and wandering hungrily about the rest of the beautiful room.
"Well," he said, after a few moments, "good-by!" And he walked toward the door.
"Stop!" cried Mr. Montagu again. He sat forward on the edge of the chair, trembling. After hours of successive surprises, the simple announcement of his visitor's departure had struck him cold with the accumulated force of his past lonely terror and his present intense curiosity. Again the boy had obeyed his command with a visible shiver, and it hurt the older man by recalling to him the suggestion of crime, of the place and the tragedy he must have escaped from, the unknown cloud he was under. But however involved in the horrible he might become by detaining him, shaken and filled with inexplicable grief as he was by his presence, worst of all was the fear of being alone again after a frightful, brief adventure in his life, vanished and unexplained. He wanted to reassure and comfort the wavering, sorrowful boy, but all he could stammer in apology for his shout was: "Wh—where are you going?"
"What difference does it make to you where I go?" asked the boy drearily. "If you must know, I'm going to Maurice's."