"
A silence fell between the two men. Presently the steward withdrew.
"I'll be seeing after your honour's room," he murmured "and there's others
to tell. There's a drop of something left, too, in the cellars, thank God!"
Jocelyn Thew listened to the retreating footsteps and then for a moment
pushed open the window. There was the old roar once more, which seemed to
have dwelt in his ears; the salt sting, the scream of the pebbles, the cry
of a wheeling gull. There was the headland round which he had sailed his
yacht, the moorland over which he had wandered with his gun, the meadow
round which he had tried the wild young horses. In those few seconds of
ecstatic joy, he seemed for the first time to realise all that he had
suffered during his long exile.
More and more unreal seemed to grow the world in which Sir Denis Jocelyn
Cathley passed that day. Time after time, the great hall in which he had
played when a boy, draughty now but still moderately weather-tight, had
echoed to the roars of welcome from old associates. But the climax of it
all came later on, when he sat at the head of the long, black oak table,
presiding over what was surely the strangest feast ever prepared and given
to the strangest gathering of guests.
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