“Who was that man?” said Cora with some curiosity.
“That old fellow? I haven’t an idea. You see I’ve been away from here so many years I remember almost no one. Why?”
“I don’t know, unless it was because I had an idea you were thinking of him instead of me. You didn’t listen to what I said.”
“That was because I was thinking so intensely of you,” he began instantly. “A startlingly vivid thought of you came to me just then. Didn’t I look like a man in a trance?”
“What was the thought?”
“It was a picture: I saw you standing under a great bulging sail, and the water flying by in moonlight; oh, a moon and a night such as you have never seen! and a big blue headland looming up against the moon, and crowned with lemon groves and vineyards, all sparkling with fireflies—old watch-towers and the roofs of white villas gleaming among olive orchards on the slopes—the sound of mandolins——”
“Ah!” she sighed, the elderly man, his grandchild, and his apple well-forgotten.
“Do you think it was a prophecy?” he asked.
“What do you think?” she breathed. “That was really what I asked you before.”
“I think,” he said slowly, “that I’m in danger of forgetting that my `hidden treasure’ is the most important thing in the world.”