AFTER an unsubstantial dinner of grilled sweetbreads and mushrooms, and
a frozen pudding, he continued his interrupted letter: “But there isn't
any use in my trying to write my love in words; it won't go into words,
even inside of me I can't explain it--it seems as if instead of its
being a part of me that I am a part of it, of something too big for me
to see the end of.” Then he became practicable, and wrote optimistically
of the things that were soon to be.
There was a letter box at the upper corner of the street, and, passing
the porch, he saw the biologist sunk in an attitude of profound
dejection. His daughter sat with bare arms and neck at his side; her
hair was bound in a gleaming mass about her ears, and one hand was laid
upon the man's shoulder, while she patted Thomas Huxley with the other.
The dog rose, growling belligerently at the unfamiliar figure, but sank
again beneath a sharp command. When he returned Rufus Hardinge greeted
him, and turned to his daughter with a murmured suggestion, but she
shook her head in decisive negation. A light shone palely in the long
windows at their back. The sun, at its skyey, evening toilette, seemed,
in the rosy glow of westering candles, to scatter a cloud of powdered
gold over the worn and huddled shoulders of the world.
Suddenly, seemingly in reconsideration of her decision, she called, “Oh,
Anthony!” and he retraced his steps to the porch. “My father suggests
that you sit here,” she told him distantly. “He says that you are very
young, and that solitude is not good for you.”
“Annot,” the older man protested humorously, “you have mangled my intent
beyond any recognition.” With an unstudied, friendly gesture he tended
Anthony his cigar case. A deep preoccupation enveloped him; he sat with
loose hands and unseeing eyes. In the deepening twilight his countenance
was grey. Anthony had taken a position upon the edge of the porch, his
feet in the fragrant grass, out of which fireflies rose glimmering,
mounting higher and higher, until, finally, they disappeared into the
night above, in the pale birth of the stars.
A deep silence enfolded them until in an unexpected, low voice, Rufus
Hardinge repeated mechanically aloud lines called, evidently, out of a
memory of long ago:
''Within thy beams, Oh, Sun! or who could find,
While fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,