“He said, ‘What are you doing, hanging over this dark, romantic chasm?’ And I just had presence of mind enough to play up.

“‘Naturally, I’m waiting for a phantom lover.’  Then the answer to that flashed on me and I said in a hurry, ’I thought you never came to these things.’

“’I came to see you’—­he really said it—­and then, ’And—­am I sufficiently demoniacal?’ And he had swallowed a pigeon.

“‘Oh dear, no!’ said I.  ’You are much too respectable.  You are from Boston.’

“‘And you from Virginia,’ said he.  ’I hear that a certain Stewart once unjustifiably claimed kinship with your branch of the family and has since been known as the Pretender.’

“‘That is quite true,’ said I.  ’And I hear that once when the Ark ran aground a little voice was heard piping:  ’Save me! save me!  I am a Fowler of Boston!’

“That was the silly way we began.  Isn’t it incredible?”

“He could be silly—­that was one of the lovable things,” Hugh mused.  “And he could say the most nakedly natural things.  But he generally used the mandarin dialect.  He thought in it, I suppose.”

“No,” the stranger corrected him.  “He thought in thoughts.  Brilliant people always do.  The words just wait like a—­a—­”

“Layette,” said Hugh.  “What else did he say?”

“The next I remember we were leaning together, all but touching.  And he was telling me about the little green gate.”

Hugh’s hand shut.  “He always called it that.  Was he thinking of it even then?”

“Oh yes!”

“He never was like a person of this world,” said Hugh, under his breath.

“The loneliest creature I ever knew.”

They fell silent, like two old friends whose sorrow is the same.

“He believed,” Hugh went on, after a moment, “that when life became intolerable you had a perfect right to take the shortest way out.  And he thought of it as a little green gate, swinging with its shadow in the twilight so that a touch would let you into the sweetest, dimmest old garden.”

“But he loved life.”

“Sometimes.  The colour of it and the unexpectedness.  He believed the word didn’t have any definite plan, but just wandered along the road and picked up adventures.  And he loved that.  He said God made a new earth every day and he rather fancied a new heaven oftener.  But he got so dead tired at the end, homesick for the underground....  I wonder ...”

The little woman was looking past him, straight into an evocation of a vanished presence that was so real, so nearly tangible, that Hugh was forced to lay violent hands upon his absurd impulse to glance over his shoulder “I wouldn’t let him,” she said, in a tone the young man had never heard before.

“You mean ...”

“I couldn’t bear it.  I made him promise me that he wouldn’t.  I can’t tell you that.  We talked for a long time and the night was full of doom.  He was tired then, but that wasn’t all.  He felt what was coming—­the Shadow ... and he was in terror.  What he dreaded most was that it might change him in some way, make him something beastly and devilish—­he who had always loved whatever was lovely and merciful and of good report.”