The Return

d the basins on the washstand as uninviting as the bed. Lawford sat down on the edge of it in complete isolation. He sat without stirring, listening to his watch ticki

d, very, very softly and gradually, the key of his door tu

ng; easily till morning. He had never noticed before how empty a well-furnished room could seem. It was his own room too; his best visitors' room. His father-in-law had slept here, with his whiske

d enlarged about twelve years ago. It was a brighter, younger, hairier, but unmistakably the same dull indolent Lawford who had ventured into Widderstone churchyard that afternoon. The cheek was a little plumper, the eyes not quite so full-lidded, the hair a little more precisely parted, the upper lip graced w

r of transformation beside which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house to house-a ch

gful, so desolate, and yet so indomitably courageous. In the brain behind them a slow and stolid argument was in prog

f dreams, else, why this violent a

paralleled position. Sheila's pathetic incredulity, his old vicar's laborious kindness, the tiresome network of experience into which he would be dragged struggling on the mo

d, no 'change,' he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet Lawford, in his best visitor's room, deciding between inscrutable life and just

immed with scrutiny, but a face that was becoming a kind of hold on life, even a kind of refuge, an ally. It was a face that might have come out of a rather flashy book; or such as is revered on the stage. 'A rotten bad face,' he whispered at it in his own familiar slang, after some such abrupt e

the china candlestick, and poised it above the sardonic reflection, as if to throw. Then slowly, with infinite pains, he drew back from the glass and replaced the candlestick on the table; stuffed his paper pa