“Oh, I’m sure not!  Your uncle made me understand,” faltered Mrs. Shirley.  “They knew you could speak more freely without them.”

“He’s wonderful with the wireless,” Hugh agreed.  “But they were in terror, anyway, as to how freely I was about to speak before them.  They can’t stand this.  Everything really human seems pretty well alien to Uncle Winthrop.  He’s exhibit A of the people who consider civilization a mistake.  And my aunt Maria is a truly good woman—­charities and all that—­but if you put a rabbit in her brain it would incontinently curl up and die in convulsions.”

She laughed helplessly, and Hugh reported an advance.

“Nevertheless,” he added quaintly, “we don’t really dislike each other.”

“I’m the last of the family, you see; I’m the future....  Can’t we skip the preliminaries?” he broke out.  “You don’t feel that I am a stranger, do you?” He halted on the verge of the confidence that he found no barrier in her advanced age.  He knew plenty of women of forty who had never grown up much and who met him on perfectly equal terms.  This, however, was a case by itself.  He plunged back into the memories of Uncle Hugh.  He spoke of his charm, his outlook on life, sometimes curiously veiled, often uncannily clairvoyant; his periods of restless suffering tending to queer, unsocial impulses; then the flowering of an interval of hard work and its reward of almost supernatural joy.

“He used to go around in a rainbow,” said Hugh, “a sort of holy soap bubble.  I hardly dared to speak to him for fear of breaking it.  It came with a new inspiration, and while it lasted nothing on earth was so important.  Then when it was finished he never wanted to see the thing again.”

“Go on,” said his listener.  Her grey eyes plumbed his with a child’s directness.  He was conscious of his will playing on her.  He was keeping his part of the contract, but he was also breaking the way for hers.  He must not let them go for a moment, those grey eyes like a girl’s that grew absent-minded so easily.  Only a little more and his mood would curve around both them, a glamorous mist of feeling.

“You go on,” he murmured.  “Can’t you see how much I want you to?  Can’t you feel how much I’m the right person to know?”

“I could never tell any one.  You want—­”

“Anything, everything.  You must have known him better than anybody in he world did.”

“I think so,” she said, slowly “And I saw him alone only twice in my life.”

For some time he had sat with his long fingers over his mouth, afraid of checking her by an untimely word.