‘Shall I go on? You think me old? It is a young man’s delusion, my dear Wheatley.’
Bear-baiting may have been excellent sport—its defenders so declare—but I do not remember that it was ever considered pleasant for the bear. I felt now much as the bear must have felt. I rose abruptly from the table.
‘All these things require thought,’ said Mouraki gently. ‘We will talk of them again this afternoon. I have a little business to do now.’
Saying this, he rose and leisurely took his way upstairs. I was left alone in the hall so familiar to me; and my first thought was a regret that I was not again a prisoner there, with Constantine seeking my life, Phroso depending on my protection, and Mouraki administering some other portion of his district. That condition of things had been, no doubt, rather too exciting to be pleasant; but it had not made me harassed, wretched, humiliated, exasperated almost beyond endurance: and such was the mood in which the two conversations of the morning left me.
A light step sounded on the stair: the figure that of all figures I least wished to see then, that I rejoiced to see more than any in the world besides, appeared before me. Phroso came down. She reached the floor of the hall and saw me. For a long moment we each rested as we were. Then she stepped towards me, and I rose with a bow. She was very pale, but a smile came on her lips as she murmured a greeting to me and passed on. I should have done better to let her go. I rose and followed. On the marble pavement by the threshold I overtook her; there we stood again looking on the twinkling sea in the distance, as we had looked before. I was seeking what to say.
‘I must thank you,’ I said; ‘yet I can’t. It was magnificent.’
The colour suddenly flooded her face.
‘You understood?’ she murmured. ‘You understood why? It seemed the only way; and I think it did help a little.’
I bent down and kissed her hand.
‘I don’t care whether it helped,’ I said. ‘It was the thing itself.’