When the others were going, Mrs. Watson asked him to stay a while, and Ferdinand stayed. She led him to a little sitting room, high above the town, and stood by the window. And he stood beside her.
“Your message this afternoon,” she said, presently, “I enjoyed more than anything I have ever heard you say before. If we could only see! If we could only see!”
Mrs. Watson lifted her blue eyes to him... and for an instant Ferdinand felt that she was more the woman of mystery than ever. For there lurked within the eyes an equivocal ripple of light; an unsteady glint that came and went. Had it not been for her words, Ferdinand might have feared that she was about to break into one of her disconcerting ebullitions of levity. But he perceived in her, at the same time, a certain tension, an unusual strain, and was reassured... she was a little strange, perhaps, because of his near presence. She was reacting to the magnetism which was flowing out of him in great waves, and she was striving to conceal from him her psychic excitement. That would account for any strangeness in her manner, any constraint.
“If we could only see!” she repeated.
“You always see,” hazarded Ferdinand.
“I sometimes see,” said Mrs. Watson. “I have sometimes seen more than it was intended for me to see.”
What could she mean by that? Ferdinand asked himself. And for an instant he was unpleasantly conscious again of the something ambiguous in her mood. Suddenly she turned and switched on the electric light in the room, and then went and stood by the window again. Ferdinand's psychic feathers were a trifle rumpled by the action. It was growing dusk... but he would have liked to talk to her in the twilight, looking out over the roofs.
“If we could only see into the hearts ... into the homes,” she mused yet again.
“If you could see into my heart now ... Alethea...”
He left the sentence unfinished. She did not look at him. She turned her face so he could not see it.