He didn't. His careless, happy look had left him. Increasingly, every day, Olva seemed to see in him a likeness to his mother and sister. The eyes now were darker, the tines of the mouth were harder.
Meanwhile so strong bad the dream's impression been that Olva could not yet disentangle it from his waking thoughts. He was in his room and yet the white road stretched out of it--somewhere there by the bookcase--oil through the mist into the heart of the dark wood.
He had welcomed during these last days Craven's advances towards friendship, partly because he wanted friends now, and partly, he was beginning now to recognize, there was, in the back of his mind, the lingering memory of the kind eyes of Margaret Craven. He perceived, too, that here was sign enough of change in him--that he who had, from his earliest days, held himself proudly, sternly aloof from all human companionship save that of his father, should now, so readily and eagerly, greet it. Craven had been proud of him, eager to be with him, and had shown, in his artless opinions of men and things, the simplest, most innocent of characters.
"Time to light up," said Olva. The room had grown very dark.
Olva noticed at once that there was a new note in Craven's voice. The boy moved, restlessly, about the room.
"I say," he brought out at last, laughing nervously, "don't go asleep when I'm in the room again. It gives one fits."
Both men were conscious of some subtle, vague impression moving in the darkness between them.
Olva answered gravely, "I've been sticking in at an old paper I've been working on--no use to anybody, and I've been neglecting my proper work for it, but it's absorbed me. That's what's given me such bad nights, I expect."
"I shouldn't have thought," Craven answered slowly, "that anything ever upset you; I shouldn't have thought you had any nerves. And, in any case, I didn't know you had thought twice about the Carfax business."
Olva turned on the electric light. At the same moment there was a loud knock on the door.
Craven opened it, showing in the doorway a pale and flustered Bunning. Craven looked at him with a surprised stare, and then, calling out good-bye to Olva, walked off.
Bunning stood hesitating, his great spectacles shining owl-like in the light.