"You would shout, of course." Yet he did not say it critically.
"——the figure rose and turned and came to meet me. It was LeVallon."
Devonham paused a moment. Fillery's eyes were fixed upon him.
"I admit," Devonham went on, conscious of the other's inquiring and intent expression, "I was surprised a bit." He smiled his faint, unwilling smile. "The figure made me start. I was aware of an emotion I am not subject to—what I called just now the creeps. I thought, at last, I had really seen a—a vision. He looked so huge, so wonderful, so radiant. It was, of course, the effect of coloured smoke and magnifying sunset, added to his semi-nakedness. To the waist he was stripped. But, at first, his size, his splendour, a kind of radiance borrowed from the sunlight and the fire, seemed to enlarge him beyond human. He seemed to dominate, even to fill the little valley.
"I stood still, uncertain of my feelings. There was, I think, a trace of fear in me. I waited for him to come up to me. He did so. He stretched out a hand. I took it. And what do you think he said?"
Fillery, the inner excitement and delight increasing in him as he listened, stared in silence. There was no lightness in him now.
"'Are you Fillery?' That's what he said, and the first words he uttered. 'Are you Fillery?' But spoken in a way I find difficult to reproduce. He made the name sound like a rush of wind. 'F,' of course, involves a draught of breath between the teeth, I know. But he made the name sound exactly like a gush of wind through branches—that's the nearest I can get to it."
"Well—and then?"
"Don't be impatient, Edward. I try to be accurate. But really—what happened next is a bit beyond any experience that we—I—have yet come across. And, as to what I felt—well, I was tired, hungry, thirsty. I wanted, normally, rest and food and drink. Yet all these were utterly forgotten. For a moment or two—I admit it—I felt as if I had come face to face with something not of this earth quite." He grinned. "A touch of gooseflesh came to me for the first time in my life. The fellow's size and radiance in the sunlight, the fact that he stood there worshipping fire—always, to me, the most wonderful of natural phenomena—his grandeur and nakedness—the way he pronounced your name even—all this—er—upset my judgment for the moment." He paused again. He hesitated. "A visual hallucination, due to fatigue, can be, of course, very detailed sometimes," he added, a note of challenge in his tone.
Fillery watched his friend narrowly, as he stumbled among the details of what he evidently found a difficult, almost an impossible description.