He had kept touch with the Home. The Rockleys knew that,
when Hadrian made a declaration, in his quiet, half-jeering manner, it
was worse than useless to oppose him. So at last the boy departed, going
to Canada under the protection of the Institution to which he had
belonged. He said good-bye to the Rockleys without a word of thanks, and
parted, it seemed, without a pang. Matilda and Emmie wept often to think
of how he left them: even on their father's face a queer look came. But
Hadrian wrote fairly regularly from Canada. He had entered some
electricity works near Montreal, and was doing well.
At last, however, the war came. In his turn, Hadrian joined up and came
to Europe. The Rockleys saw nothing of him. They lived on, just the same,
in the Pottery House. Ted Rockley was dying of a sort of dropsy, and in
his heart he wanted to see the boy. When the armistice was signed,
Hadrian had a long leave, and wrote that he was coming home to the
Pottery House.
The girls were terribly fluttered. To tell the truth, they were a little
afraid of Hadrian. Matilda, tall and thin, was frail in her health, both
girls were worn with nursing their father. To have Hadrian, a young man
of twenty-one, in the house with them, after he had left them so coldly
five years before, was a trying circumstance.
They were in a flutter. Emmie persuaded her father to have his bed made
finally in the morning-room downstairs, whilst his room upstairs was
prepared for Hadrian.
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