Then, as white, half-stupefied, she watched him, he turned and climbed the
steps again and stood beside her.
"You had better go to George Boult," he said. "Boult will tell you what to
do. Are you listening? Go to Boult."
"But aren't you coming back to-morrow, William? You can't leave us like
this! You must come back!"
He was going down the steps again. There was a moon clear in a frosty sky.
How white the steps shone! For all her life she remembered the big,
unwieldy figure of her husband shuffling down them.
"I don't know what my movements may be. Just at present they are
uncertain." Arrived on the pavement he turned his miserable, furtive eyes
on her as she stood in the open door, the brightly-lit hall of home behind
her. "Shut the door," he said with something of his old passionate
irritability of manner. "I don't want all the world to know I'm going away
to-night. Shut the door!"
She obeyed him, as ever when he used that tone to her, with nervous haste.
William Day waited a moment to hear the bolts slipping into place. It was
a duty he performed himself every night of his life as he went up to bed.
The door was bolted with him on the wrong side of it, now. Never, he knew,
in all the years to come would he turn the lock of security on the
sleeping house and shuffle upstairs, bed-candle in hand, to warmth and
comfort and peaceful sleep again.
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