Three weeks passed. Prothero had been four times to see Miss Gunning. He had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. It was then borne in on him that what he required was a pretext. Calling late one evening he caught Miss Gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph for the papers while she talked to Mr. Gunning.

His pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. He could not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs), but he could talk to Mr. Gunning. It was not so difficult as he would have at first supposed. He had already learnt the trick of it. You took a chair. You made a statement. Any statement would do. You had only to say to Mr. Gunning, "Isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you, with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for you to do it again; and you went on talking to Miss Gunning until he showed signs of restlessness. When you had done this several times running he would sink back in his chair appeased. But Prothero had discovered that if you concentrated your attention on Mr. Gunning, if you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to sleep; and while he slept Laura wrote.

And while Laura wrote, Owen could keep on looking at her as much as he liked.

From where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a side view of Laura. He could see her head as it bent and turned over her work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of Laura's head. From time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache.

And Laura said to herself, "He is rather ugly, but I like him."

It was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing was the peace that in his presence settled on Papa. Once he had got over the first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see Laura. They were always the same people, Miss Holland and Miss Lempriere and Mr. Tanqueray. They did no positive violence to the illusion; in their way they ministered to it. They took their place among the company of brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with cold ceremony and a high and 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 explained, was not always as Mr. Prothero saw him now. His illness came from a sunstroke.

He said, yes; he had seen cases like that in India.

"Then, do you think——"

She paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional opinion.

"Do I think? What do I think?"

"That he'll get better?"

He was silent a long time.

"No," he said. "But he need never be any worse. You mustn't be afraid."

"I am afraid. I'm afraid all the time."

"What of?"

"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face it."

"You've nerve enough for anything."

"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially the thing I'm afraid of."

"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost whispered.

"I'm afraid of his having a fit—epilepsy. He might have it."

"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."

"I'm always thinking of it. And the most—the most awful thing is that—I'm afraid of seeing it."

She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to an unpardonable shame.

"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."

"You?"

"I."

"Oh—but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."

"Wouldn't I?"

"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did you?"

"Because I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way. My father was a country doctor—a surgeon. One day he sent me into his surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me—I was a boy about fifteen at the time—to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"

"You fainted?—You were ill on the spot?"

"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."

A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for the vibration of some spiritual recoil.

"What do you say to that?"

"I don't say anything."

"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."

"They might have known," she said.

"They might have known what?"

"That you were different."

"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I was a man—that I wasn't different after all."

"Well—you proved it."

"If I did my father never knew it."

"And your mother?" she said softly.

"I believe she knew."

"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"

"I never let her know, really, how different I was."

"You kept it to yourself?"

"It was the only way to keep it."

"Your genius?"

"If you choose to call it that."

"The thing," she said, "that made you different."

"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that that was where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."

"You couldn't lose it."

"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again."

She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it.

"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror—the most awful terror there is—of never getting back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it—seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else matters. Nothing else is."

She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.

"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to."

"I see."

Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit surer than she was now.

No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself that he put to the test.

And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them, he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his soul and its exultant, processional vision of God.

"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm still afraid of the sight of blood."

"So I suppose I shall go on being afraid."

"Probably. But you won't turn tail any more than I should. You never ran away."

"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries. Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be alone."

"My child, you mustn't. It's simply criminal."

"If I didn't," she said, "I should never get it in."

He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.

"I know it's criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it. Sometimes I'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own things; things, I mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in having done them."

"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. God made you an artist."

She sighed. "He's made me so many things besides. That's where the misery comes in."

"And a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery didn't come in."

She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery's all very well for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it. Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"

"And if you're being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection that you're not aware of——?"

She shook her head again.

"I'm certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But—look at Papa."

She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.

"If Papa had been one of its experiments—but he wasn't. It had got him all right at first. You've no idea how nice Papa was. You've only to look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can't say them any more."

She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.

"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away—it doesn't look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"

"The finest bits aren't thrown away. It's what you still have with you, what you see, that's being thrown away—broken up by some impatient, impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its instinct for perfection. Do you see?"

"I see that you're trying to make me happier about Papa. It's awfully nice of you."

"I'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body. To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual energies. We're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease. It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies. It's a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases which are most like death—the horrible diseases that tear down the body from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of the building up—why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to the secret—the mystery—the romance of dissolution."

His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the darkness that wrapped her.

"If you could see through it you'd understand, you'd see that this body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium, transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside what we give."

Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I understand."

"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts, infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable forces, and that we—we—unmake the work of millions of Æons in a moment, that we charge it with our will, our instincts, our memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ of us—so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when they scatter, is the seed of our universe, flung heaven knows where."

For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know," she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to know how you know about it."

A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and incommunicable.

"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."

"What won't I tell you?"

"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"

"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."

"I can only see that they've gone."

"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."

"Ah——"

"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."

"How do you know?" she reiterated.

"I can't tell you."

"You can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at it."

"I can't tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go."

She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.

It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.

"I'm glad I've seen you," she said at last.

He ignored the valediction of her tone.

"And when am I to see you again?" he said.

This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.

He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.

He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He turned.

"Well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?"

They were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she would keep him from ever entering again.

"Or," said he, "may I come again? Soon?"

"Do," she said, "and bring Nina with you."

She set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from him into the darkness of the room.