"I do not suppose," he continued, "that I shall ever see you again on earth, as you proceed with your journey to-morrow; and indeed I think it will perhaps be as well that this should be our last conversation, so that nothing else should interfere to blur the impression.
"One last word then." He paused for a moment, and the stillness was broken only by the faintest stir of odorous wind among the spice-trees and a waft of distant evening noises.
"You are treading a path, though you do not realize it, which it is not given to many men to tread. You have had your first intimation of the goal to-day, and the future will not be wanting in indications of the same; but, as I have said, you will suddenly, when you least expect it, step inside the circle, and everything will be changed.
"To you I wish to intrust a future that I can not mould myself, to be moulded, not for me, but for the great Master of all. You are the chosen instrument for this. My work lies in another region, which you will realize on that day when all things are made plain.
"Only remember that your destiny is high and arduous, and that a single false step may throw you from a precipice that has taken years to scale once, and that must be scaled again. For you walk among the clouds, or very near them; you are not defiled by any gross habitual sin; your heart is pure, and you have known suffering. You are a true novice.
"In a year, as I have said, I shall claim your answer. And now farewell for a season. When we next meet we shall have a larger common ground; we shall be master and pupil no longer.
"You shall see the boy once again, by his wish and my own. He shall go with you to your house to-night, and travel with you the first stage to-morrow. I have arranged for his return."
He then conducted Arthur into the house, where he bade adieu to the mistress and to the younger son; the elder, his charge that was to be, meeting him as he came out, and accompanying him home. The boy had formed a great attachment to him, and the idea of their future relations sent a strange and unwonted glow into Arthur's mind, so that he parted from him on the next day, "with wonder in his heart," and something very like an ache too.
This last episode will appear to my readers to be so fantastic as to give the work at once a fictional character; they will say that on some real lines I have constructed a romance of the wildest type, and that Arthur is no longer an interesting personality, because as a rule he is too ordinary to be ideal, in the last two chapters too illusory to be real.
All I can urge is this: the chapters shall be their own defence. If I had wished to present my readers with nothing but a dry chronicle of facts I should have toned this down to something more prosaic. But every one who has had any experience of life will know that her surprises are sometimes very bewildering; that fiction is nothing but uncommon experience made ordinary, or heaped inartistically upon a single character.