And when they came home, bringing sugar-plums and a few toys for the little ones, they were all a little tired with this unusual, this extraordinary dissipation. After tea the pinafores did not make much progress; they were too much excited to care to go on with their reading. They wanted to talk over everything and enjoy it a second time more at their leisure. They had shaken off the sense of responsibility, and only felt the pleasure of the holiday, which was so rare in their life. Mr. Penton himself was seduced into making comparison of the London of which they had thus had a flying glimpse with the London he had known in the old days, and into telling stories of which somehow the point got lost in the telling, but which had been, as he said, “very amusing at the time;” while the girls listened and laughed, not at his stories so much as out of their own consciousness that it had all been “fun,” even the inconveniences of the day, and the prosiness of those inevitable tales. Mrs. Penton was the one who subsided most easily out of the excitement. But for a little look of complacence, an evident sense that it was she who had procured them all this pleasure, there was less trace in her than in any of the others of the day’s outing. She drew her work-basket to her as usual after tea. She was not to be beguiled out of her evening’s work; but she smiled as she went on with her darning, and listened to the father’s stories, and the saucy commentaries of the girls, with a happy abandonment of all authority in consideration of the unusual character of the day. The only thing that brought a momentary shadow over the party was that Walter was not there.
“There is no moon to-night, but Wat is off again for one of his walks. I wonder what has made him so fond of walks, just when we want him at home?” the girls cried. And then a little mist came over his mother’s eyes. She said, “Hush! he is probably at his Greek;” but whether she believed this or not nobody could say.
Walter, it need scarcely be said, was not at his Greek. He went up the road toward the village with long strides devouring the way, though there was no moon nor any visible inducement. The village was as quiet a spot as could be found in all England. The only lights it showed were in a few cottage windows, or glimmering from behind the great holly-bushes at the rectory; a little bit of a straggling street, with an elbow composed of a dozen little houses, low and irregular, which streamed away toward the dark and silent fields, with the church, the natural center, rising half seen, a dark little tower pointing upward to the clouds. There was scarcely any one about, or any movement save at the public-house, where what was quite an illumination in the absence of other lights--the red glow of the fire, and the reflection of a lamp through a red curtain--streamed out into the road, making one warm and animated spot in the gloom. Wat, however, did not go near that center of rustic entertainment. He stopped at a low wall which surrounded a cottage on the outskirts--a cottage which had once been white, and had still a little grayness and luminousness of aspect which detached it from the surrounding darkness. A few bristling dry branches of what was in summer a bit of hedge surrounded the low projection of the wall. Walter paused there, where there was nothing visible to pause for. The night was dark. A confused blank of space, where in daylight the great stretch of the valley lay, was before him, sending from afar a fresh breath of wind into his face, while behind him, in the nearer distance, shone the few cottage lights, culminating in the red glow from the Penton Arms. What did he want at this corner with his back against the wall? Nothing, so far as any one could see. He made no signal, gave forth no sound, save that occasionally his feet made a stir on the beaten path as he changed his position. They got tired, but Walter himself was not tired. Presently came the faint sound of a door opening, and a flitting of other feet--light, short steps that scarcely seemed to touch the ground--and then the gate of the little garden clicked, and, heard, not visible, something came out into the road.