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"Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should have had to tell her how I came to know you." "And what would have been the objection to that?" "It would have entailed other explanations; there would at any rate have been that danger." "Surely she knew you went every day to church," Stransom objected. "She didn't know what I went for." "Of me then she never even heard?"
"They're here for you," Stransom said, "they're present to-night as they've never been. They speak for you don't you see? in a passion of light; they sing out like a choir of angels. Don't you hear what they say? they offer the very thing you asked of me." "Don't talk of it don't think of it; forget it!"
It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance, that it really was, and the prospect stretched grey and void before him. All he could say, however, was: "I hope you'll try before you give up." "If I had known you had ever known him I should have taken for granted he had his candle," she presently answered.
After a few moments he shifted his seat; it was almost indelicate to be so aware of her. But Stransom subsequently quite lost himself, floating away on the sea of light. If occasions like this had been more frequent in his life he would have had more present the great original type, set up in a myriad temples, of the unapproachable shrine he had erected in his mind.
Friend by friend dropped away till at last there were more emblems on his altar than houses left him to enter. She was more than any other the friend who remained, but she was unknown to all the rest. Once when she had discovered, as they called it, a new star, she used the expression that the chapel at last was full. "Oh no," Stransom replied, "there is a great thing wanting for that!
She had taken what Hague had given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions was only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to produce.
The happy pair had just arrived from America, and Stransom hadn't needed to be told this to guess the nationality of the lady. Somehow it deepened the foolish air that her husband's confused cordiality was unable to conceal. Stransom recalled that he had heard of poor Creston's having, while his bereavement was still fresh, crossed the sea for what people in such predicaments call a little change.
"Are those who can hurt us most," Stransom broke in. "Ah it's not true you've NOT forgiven him!" she wailed with a passion that startled him. He looked at her as never yet. "What was it he did to you?" "Everything!" Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell. "Good-bye." He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man's death. "You mean that we meet no more?"
This was an exhibition he always liked, and he dropped into a seat with relief. More than it had ever yet come home to him it struck him as good there should be churches. This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; a verger shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed to Stransom there was hospitality in the thick sweet air.
To provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of his turpitudes was not to pity but to glorify him. The more Stransom thought the more he made out that whatever this relation of Hague's it could only have been a deception more or less finely practised. Where had it come into the life that all men saw?
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