distant courtesy. They stayed for a short
time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room,
they existed only for each other and for Laura. Thus one half of his
dream remained incomprehensible to Mr. Gunning. He did not really know
these people.

But he knew Mr. Prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour
and smoked a pipe with him. He had known him intimately and for a long
time. His figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and
made it warm, tangible and complete. And because the vanished smokers,
the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to
Laura, therefore Mr. Gunning's mind ceased to connect Prothero with his
formidable idea.

Laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to
the idea. She waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she
sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. Sooner or later it
would come, and when it did come Papa would ask Mr. Prothero his
intentions, and Mr. Prothero, having of course no intentions, would go
away and never have anything to do with them again.

Prothero had not yet asked himself his intentions or even wondered what
he was there for, since, as it seemed, it was not to talk to Laura.
There had been opportunities, moments, pauses in the endless procession
of paragraphs, when he had tried to draw Laura out; but Laura was not to
be drawn. She had a perfect genius for retreating, vanishing from him
backwards, keeping her innocent face towards him all the time, but
backing, backing into her beloved obscurity. He felt that there were
things behind her that forbade him to pursue.

Of the enchantment that had drawn her in the beginning, she had not said
a word. When it came to that they were both silent, as by a secret
understanding and consent. They were both aware of his genius as a thing
that was and was not his, a thing perpetually present with them but
incommunicable, the very heart of their silence.

One evening, calling about nine o'clock, he found her alone. She told
him that Papa was very tired and had gone to bed. "It is very good of
you," she said, "to come and sit with him."

Prothero smiled quietly. "May I sit with _you_ now?"

"Please do."

They sat by the fireside, for even in mid-June the night was chilly. A
few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. Laura had
raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father.

Papa, she expl