"It's all a long, long way off, cousin; and I'm sure I cannot guess how you come to know anything at all about it," said Honor.
Then the traveller told her, beginning his narrative at the point where he had asked Christopher the road to Bear Down. He concluded with a friendly word.
"Handsome he is, for certain, with the wind and the sun on his cheek; and a man of his own ideas, I judge; an original man. I wish you joy, Honor, if I may call you Honor."
"What nonsense! Of course. And I'm glad you like my Christo, because then you'll like me too, I hope. We have very much in common really. We see things alike, live alike, laugh alike. He has a wonderful sense of humour; it teaches him to look at the world from the outside."
"A mighty unwholesome, unnatural attitude for any man," said Mark Endicott.
"Yet hardly from the outside either, if he's so human as to want a wife?" asked Honor's cousin.
"He wants a wife," she answered calmly, "to take the seat next him at the theatre, to walk beside him through the picture-gallery, to compare notes with, to laugh with at the fun of the fair, as he calls it."
Mr. Endicott's needles tapped impatiently.
"Vain talk, vain talk," he said.
"It may be vain, uncle, but it's none the less true," she answered. "If I do not know Christopher, who does? The companionship of a congenial spirit is the idea in his mind—perhaps in mine too. He's a laughing philosopher, and so platonic, so abstracted, that if he had found a man friend, instead of a woman, he would have been just as content to swear eternal friendship and invite the man to sit and watch the great play with him and laugh away their lives together."