Book Two The Woman - Chapter 47 In Which This History is Ended

A bright room, luxuriously appointed; a great wide bed with
carved posts and embroidered canopy; between the curtained
windows, a tall oak press with grotesque heads carved thereon,
heads that leered and gaped and scowled at me. But the bed and
the room and the oak press were all familiar, and the grotesque
heads had leered and gaped and frowned at me before, and haunted
my boyish dreams many and many a night.

And now I lay between sleeping and waking, staring dreamily at
all these things, till roused by a voice near by, and starting
up, broad awake, beheld Sir Richard.

"Deuce take you, Peter!" he exclaimed; "I say--the devil fly away
with you, my boy!--curse me!--a nice pickle you've made of
yourself, with your infernal Revolutionary notions--your digging
and blacksmithing, your walking-tours--"

"Where is she, Sir Richard?" I broke in; "pray, where is she?"

"She?" he returned, scratching his chin with the corner of a
letter he held; "she?"

"She whom I saw last night--"

"You were asleep last night, and the night before."

"Asleep?--then how long have I been here?"

"Three days, Peter."

"And where is she--surely I have not dreamed it all--where is
Charmian?"

"She went away--this morning."

"Gone!--where to?"

"Gad, Peter!--how should I know?" But, seeing the distress in my
face, he smiled, and tendered me the letter. "She left this 'For
Peter, when he awoke'--and I've been waiting for Peter to wake
all the morning."