Читать книгу The Guarded Heights - Camp Wadsworth - Страница 10

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Lambert, hands in pockets, stopped him in the hall.

"Packed off, as you deserve, but you'll need money."

"Thanks," George said. "I don't want any I don't earn."

"If father should kick me out," Lambert drawled, "I'd be inclined to take what I could get."

"I'd rather steal," George said.

Lambert smiled whimsically.

"A word of advice. Stealing's dangerous unless you take enough."

George indicated the library door. He tried to imitate Lambert's manner.

"Then I suppose it's genius."

"What are you getting at?"

"I mean," George said, "you people may drive me to stealing, but it'll be the kind you get patted on the back for."

"Sounds like Wall Street," Lambert smiled.

George wanted to put himself on record in this house.

"I'm going to make money, and don't you forget it."

Lambert's smile widened.

"Then good luck, and a good job—George."

George crushed his helpless irritation, turned, and walked out the front door; more disappointed than he would have thought possible, because he had failed to see Sylvia.

Reluctantly he returned to the nearly silent discomfort of his parents. He tried to satisfy their curiosity.

"Nothing but threats. I'm to be driven to crime if I'm ever heard of after I leave Oakmont in the morning."

"He might have made it worse," his father grunted.

The conversation died for lack of an interpreter.

His father made a pretence of reading a newspaper. His mother examined her swollen hands. Her eyes suggested the nearness of tears. George got up.

"I suppose I'd better be getting ready."

As he stooped to kiss her his mother slipped an arm around his neck.

"Mother's little boy."

George steadied his voice.

"Good-night, Dad."

His father filled his pipe reflectively.

"Good-night, George."

No word of sympathy; no sympathy at all, beyond a fugitive, half-frightened hint from his mother, because he had run boldly against a fashion of thinking; little more, really.

He softly closed the door of his room, the last time he would ever do that! He sat on the edge of the bed. He took Sylvia's photograph from his pocket and studied it with a deliberate lack of sentiment. He fancied her desirable lips framing epithets of angry contempt and those other words to which he had given his own significance.

"You'll not forget."

He looked so long, repeating it in his mind so often, that at last his eyes blurred, and the pictured lips seemed, indeed, to curve and straighten.

"You'll not forget."

He tapped the photograph with his forefinger.

"You're going to help me remember," he muttered. "I'll not forget."