And then there was a few minutes’ brief conversation about the funeral and all the lugubrious business of such a moment. It was with a sense of relief that Edward Penton quitted for the first time the house that was his own. He looked back upon it with curiously mingled feelings. He was glad to get away. It was an escape to turn out of the avenue into the clear undisturbed air in which there was nothing to remind him of the close still atmosphere, the silence, the associations of this fatal place. But yet when he looked back his heart swelled with a sensation of pride. It was his. He had given up thinking of it, avoided looking at it, weaned his heart in every way from that house of his fathers. Never man had tried more honestly than he to give it up, entirely and from the bottom of his heart--this thing which was not to be for him. And now, without anything that could be called his doing, lo! it had come back into his hands. It was the doing of Providence, he thought: his heart swelled with a sort of solemn pride. As he went silently along, the landscape took another aspect in his sight. It was the country in which he was to spend all the rest of his life. It was his country, in which he was one of the chief people, a man important to many, known wherever he passed. By degrees a strange elation got into his mind. “Drive quickly, I am in haste to get home,” he said to the groom who drove him. “Yes, Sir Edward,” said the man, respectfully. He had changed his very name--everything was changed. Then as the red roof of Penton Hook appeared below at the foot of the hill he thought of the anxious faces looking out for him, the young ones with awe in them, thinking of the first death that had crossed their way; his wife wistful, ready to read in his face what had happened. But none of them knowing what had really happened--that Penton was his after all.
NEW YORK: GEORGE MUNRO, PUBLISHER, 17 to 27 VANDEWATER STREET.
The young people drove from Penton to the Hook very silent and overawed, the two girls close together, and Walter opposite to them, looking very heavy and dull, his eyes red with want of sleep and the air of one who has been up all night in every line of him. It is curious what an air of neglect this gives even to the clothes. He felt shabby, out of order, in every way uncomfortable in body and dazed in mind, not feeling that he knew anything about what had happened, nor that he cared to think of that. He almost went to sleep with the closeness and the motion of the carriage, and took no more notice of the presence of the stranger opposite to him than if she had been another sister. It had annoyed him for the first moment, to have her there, but by this time he was quite indifferent to the fact, indifferent to everything, dazed with sleep and agitation and the weakening influence of a struggle past. But there came a moment as they neared home when his senses returned to him with a bound. He was looking vaguely out of the carriage-window seeing nothing, when suddenly, vaguely, there appeared at a distance, going up a road which led away from the main road deep into the quiet of the fields, a solitary figure. It was little more than a speck upon the road, a little shadow almost like that of a child; but it woke Walter fully up in a moment and made his heart beat. He called to the coachman to stop, to the great astonishment of Ally, who thought that something more must have happened in a day so full of fate, and cried out,