Smiling gently at the amazing variegation of his metropolitan adventures, Gaveston crossed towards Vigo Street. Already a heartless shaft of madder light was sullenly annunciating the approach of yet another aenigmatick day. They had lingered talking a long time out there. And as he tore off his crumpled white waistcoat with impatient, smoke-stained fingers, he wondered suddenly about his father. There was a queer Quixotic strain in him, he felt, that surely did not come from the ffoulises. But he grew tired, and, drawing the too transparent dimity curtains tighter against the dawn, he leapt into bed. And through the fitful dreams that so often attend sunlight sleep, there flitted furtively the ill-matched figures of his mother and the mysterious wanton, confused in a sinister identity beyond all possibility of disentanglement. CHAPTER VII JOSS AND REREDOS Next afternoon, when Gaveston saw the prosaic mass of Paddington loom up before him, it seemed to his bewitched imagination a sudden gateway into past centuries of enchantment. The sirens of automobiles sang discordantly, flags frenetically waved, signals symbolically dropped, guards swung athletically on to their vans. Gathering daemonic impetus as it went, the 2.35 moved out Oxfordwards, and Gaveston, leaning back in the comfortably upholstered first-class compartment, fingered the unopened copy of the _University Gazette_ which he had chosen from the bookstall’s alluring variety. Now if ever was the moment to face his future, and rough-shape it like a man! He was alone: Hekla, of course, had seen to that before the cerise Rochet-Schneider had whirled him to the historic terminus. Good old Hekla! And so his musefulness was undisturbed as he gazed contemplatively out upon the Thames-beribboned landskip. Afar off he could discern the glaucous billows of the Chilterns rolling up from the plain, flecked here and there with leafless hedgery, and the hiemal beech-clumps of Pruneley and Greatstock Major. In the middle distance, placid and content, the fickle weathercocks gleamed in the faint blue smoke of half-a-hundred hidden villages, and in the foreground the flocculent cumuli were mirrored in the shining expanse of water-meadows, their erstwhile lushery now o’erflowed by the meandering floods of Januarytide. Over all drooped a sombre baldacchino of slate-coloured sky. “Gauguin,” he murmured appreciatively. “Pure Gauguin!”[14] [14] Mr. Budd enjoys the rare distinction of having spelt this painter’s name correctly in a first novel. (LIT. EXEC.) He looked again. “But English,” he went on. “Oh, ludicrously English … most distressingly English.…” And, first sign of the potent influence which these London days and London nights had wrought upon his sensibilities, he jerked down the blind, to shut out the exasperating familiarity of that fugacious country-side.