e was sure I'd find you here. So
I may tell her you'll come?"

His courtesy half broke my heart. "Why, my dear man, with all the
pleasure----! So many thousand thanks. I'll be with her."

"Thanks to _you_. She'll be down. Good-night." He looked round the
room--at the two or three clusters of men, smoking, engaged, contented,
on their easy seats and among their popped corks; he looked over an
instant at Ford Obert, whose eyes, I thought, he momentarily held. It
was absolutely as if, for me, he were seeking such things--out of what
was closing over him--for the last time. Then he turned again to the
door, which, just not to fail humanly to accompany him a step, I had
opened. On the other side of it I took leave of him. The passage, though
there was a light in the distance, was darker than the smoking-room, and
I had drawn the door to.

"Good-night, Brissenden. I shall be gone to-morrow before you show."

I shall never forget the way that, struck by my word, he let his white
face fix me in the dusk. "'Show'? _What_ do I show?"

I had taken his hand for farewell, and, inevitably laughing, but as the
falsest of notes, I gave it a shake. "You show nothing! You're
magnificent."

He let me keep his hand while things unspoken and untouched, unspeakable
and untouchable, everything that had been between us in the wood a few
hours before, were between us again. But so we could only leave them,
and, with a short, sharp "Good-bye!" he completely released himself.
With my hand on the latch of the closed door I watched a minute his
retreat along the passage, and I remember the reflection that, before
rejoining Obert, I made on it. I seemed perpetually, at Newmarch, to be
taking his measure from behind.

Ford Obert has since told me that when I came back to him there were
tears in my eyes, and I didn't know at the moment how much the words
with which he met me took for granted my consciousness of them. "He
looks a hundred years old!"

"Oh, but you should see his shoulders, always, as he goes off! _Two_
centuries--ten! Isn't it amazing?"

It was so amazing that, for a little, it made us reciprocally stare. "I
should have thought," he said, "that he would have been on the
contrary----"

"Visibly rejuvenated? So should I. I must make it out," I added. "I
_shall_."

But Obert, with less to go upon, couldn't wait. It was wonderful, for
that matter--and for all I had to go upon--how I myself could. I did so,
at this moment, in