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It had always been Bunning who had come to him. He would always see that picture -Bunning standing, clumsily, awkwardly in the doorway. Poor Bunning! When Olva came in he was sitting in a very old armchair, staring into the fire, his hair on end and his tie above his collar.
"Well, you needn't wear such boots as that and your shirts and things aren't clean. . . . You don't mind my telling you, do you?" "No, I like it, Nobody's ever told me." Here obviously was a new claim for intimacy and this Olva hurriedly disavowed. "Oh! It's only for your own good, you know. Fellows will like you better if you're decently dressed. Why hasn't any one ever told you?"
"I shall be delighted," Olva said. Lawrence came lumbering down. He always spoke as though words were a difficulty to him. He left out any word that was not of vital necessity. "Muck that-awful muck. What do they want gettin' a piffler like that kid in the glasses to read his ideas? Ain't got any not one no more 'an I have."
Into this happy confusion Olva Dune plunged. He shook off from him, as a dog shakes water from his back, the memory of that white mist-haunted road. Once he deliberately faced the moment when he had been sick faced it, heard once again the dull, lumbering sound that the body had made as it bundled along the road, and then put it from him altogether.
How much and here was the one tremendous question had he told his sister? As Olva waited, once again, in the musty hall, saw once more the dim red glass of the distant window, smelt again the scent of oranges, his heart was beating so that he could not hear the old woman's trembling voice. How would Margaret receive him?
"Look here, old man, I don't know what's the matter with you, but it's plain enough that you've got this Carfax business on your nerves drop it. It does no good it's the worst thing in the world to brood about. Carfax is dead if I could help you to find his murderer I would but I can't." Craven's whole body was trembling under Olva's hand. Olva moved back to his chair. "Craven, listen to me.
"Yes. We had a talk." "What did he say?" "Oh, nothing." "Rot. He didn't stop and talk to you about the weather. Come on, Bunning, what have you been up to?" "I haven't been up to anything." The man's lips were closed. For another half an hour Bunning sat in a chair before the fire silent. Every now and again he flung a glance at Olva.
They hung above Olva like a vast mountain range and had in their outline so sharp and real an existence that they were part of the hard black horizon, rising, immediately, out of the long, low, shivering flats. There was no sound in all the world; behind him, sharply, the Cambridge towers bit the sky before him like a clenched hand was the little wood.
"You were dreaming about a road and something about a wood . . . and a matchbox." "I've been sleeping badly." Olva got up, filled his pipe and relit it. "I expect, although we don't say much about it, the Carfax business has got on all our nerves. You don't look yourself, Craven." He didn't. His careless, happy look had left him.
Craven had not resented the repulse; it was not his habit to resent anything, and as the year had passed, Olva had realized that Craven's impetuous desire for the friendship of the world was something in him perfectly natural and unforced. Olva had discovered also that Craven's devotion to his mother and sister was the boy's leading motive in life.
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