"Already you succumb to the lure you deride," I pointed out.
He grinned back at me.
"True, I give thanks for the warning. Let us forget it."
His manner grew serious.
"For you, Ormerod, the consideration is not what Tawannears believes. You know him for a tried friend. That should suffice. His offer to you is designed to lift you from this routine, in which, dear lad—to be brutally explicit for the once—you are unable to subdue the pricking memories of that fair Mistress Marjory whom we all loved. I urge you, scorn it not. I have watched over you of late with misgivings. Y'are unsound in your mind, lad, and that's the truth on it.
"Do not mistake me. I am no fault-finder. Your life has been a hard one. You have had over-much of trial. Your loss is doubly bitter to you therefor. But that is the reason why you must drink some sharp purge of experience to cleanse your brain of the canker that gnaws now at your sanity. Tawannears points the way."
I looked at him, bewildered. From him to the Seneca, sitting cross-legged like a brazen statue, only his eyes burning with vivid emotion in his mask of a face. And from Tawannears to Corlaer, no less impassive, his little eyes almost wholly concealed behind their ramparts of flesh.
"But such a journey will require much time!" I protested.
"A year," assented Tawannears. "Perhaps more. Who can say?"
"Ja," endorsed Corlaer when I turned to him.