"I love him, I love him, I love him."
Neither spoke for some seconds; then the man lifted up his head, shook it as though he had risen from a plunge, and laughed.
"So be it. Now here's news for you, that I can relate since you've been so frank. D'you remember what I whispered to you when I was a little boy, of the cracks on my ceiling and the chance patterns I found on my window-blind when I used to lie awake in the grey of summer mornings, waiting for the first gold? You forget. So had I forgotten until a few days since. Then, being lazy, I lay abed and thought, and thought, and fell to tracing the old stories told by the lines on blind and ceiling. Chance patterns of bays and estuaries, continents and rivers, all mapped out there—all more real to me than those in my atlas. I remember a land of blackamoors, a sea of sharks, an island of cannibals, a desert of lions, in which the little flies figured as monsters of the wilderness. Such dreams of deeds by field and flood I weaved in those grey, gone mornings to the song of the thrush and the murmur of the old governor snoring in the next room! And now—now I'm smitten with the boy's yearning to speed forth over the sea of sharks—not after lions, but after gold. I'm going to justify my existence—in Australia."
"You couldn't go further off if you tried."
"Not well—without slipping over the edge altogether."
"You mustn't do this, Christopher."
"It's done, dearest. This is only a ghost—an adumbration that's talking to you. I ask for my freedom, Honor—sweetheart Honor. Thank God we are humorists both—too sensible to knock our knuckles raw against iron doors. You'll be happy to-morrow, and I the day after. We mustn't miss more laughter than we can help in this tearful world. And friends we must always be. That can't be altered."
"I quite understand. You shall not do this, Christopher. I love you for suggesting it. You may go—as far as London, or where the steamer starts from. Then you must come back to me. You've promised to marry me."
"Forget it. I'm in earnest for once. At least you must credit that. There's Mrs. Loveys at the window calling you to tea. We'll meet again in a day or two very likely."
"Don't go; don't go, Christo; I'm so lonely, and wretched, and——"