He nodded. There was an odd touch of sadness in their talk. "I've watched him with many types of people," he went on thoughtfully, almost as though thinking aloud in his rapid way, "I've talked with him on many subjects. The meanness, jealousy, insignificance of the Race shocks and amazes him. He cannot understand it. He asked me once 'But is no one born noble? To be splendid is such an effort with them!' Splendour of conduct, he noticed, is a calculated, rarely a spontaneous splendour. The general resistance to new ideas also puzzles him. 'They fear a rhythm they have never felt before,' as he put it. 'To adopt a new rhythm, they think, must somehow injure them.' That the Race respects a man because he possesses much equally bewilders him. 'No one serves willingly or naturally,' he observed, 'or unless someone else receives money for drawing attention loudly to it.' Any notion of reward, of advertisement, in its widest meaning, is foreign to his nature."
He broke off. Another pause fell between them, the girl the first to break it:
"He suffers," she said in a low voice. "Here—he suffers," and her face yearned with the love and help she longed to pour out beyond all thought of self or compensation, and at the same time with the pain of its inevitable frustration; and, watching her, Dr. Fillery understood that this very yearning was another proof of the curious impetus, the intensification of being, that "N. H." caused in everyone. Yet he winced, as though anticipating the question she at once then put to him:
"You are afraid for him, Edward?" her eyes calmly, searchingly on his. "His future troubles you?"
He turned to her with abrupt intensity. "If you, Iraida, could not enchain him——" He broke off. He shrugged his shoulders.
"I have no power," she confessed. "An insatiable longing burns like a fire in him. Nothing he finds here on earth, among men and women, can satisfy it." A faint blush stole up her neck and touched her cheeks. "He is different. I have no power to keep him here." Her voice sank suddenly to a whisper, as though a breath of awe passed into her. "He is here now at this very moment, I believe. He is with us as we talk together. I feel him." Almost a visible thrill passed through her. "And close, so very close—to you."
Dr. Fillery made no sign by word or gesture, but something in his very silence gave assent.
"And not alone," she added, still under her breath. It seemed she looked about her, though she did not actually move or turn her head. "Others—of his kind, Edward—come with him. They are always with him—I think sometimes." Her whisper was fainter still.
"You feel that too!" He said it abruptly, his voice louder and almost challenging. Then he added incongruously, as though saying it to himself this time, "That's what I mean. I've known it for a long time——"
He looked at the girl sharply with unconcealed admiration. "It does not frighten you?" he asked, and in reply she said the very thing he felt sure she would say, hoping for it even while he shrank: