A spasm of agony passed over Mr. Held’s face and he swallowed painfully. And then he continued, his face lighting up:
“Why it’s such a tremendous thing to me is that it means I can go forward; I can go on to be a Healer without any conscientious doubts as to my capacities. If I felt this mentality so much, I can feel it in other cases, so that really it means life and death to me; because this sort of thing, if it’s very good study, doesn’t mean any more than being a male nurse, so that I’ve gained immensely, even if I do go out of the house. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to be in contact with your two natures. My mentality has drawn its strength, light; I’m a different person from what I was six weeks ago.”
“Oh, come!” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Oh, it’s true,” Mr. Held answered. “In the last place I was in I had to have meals with the butler, and here you’ve been good, and I’ve made this discovery, that my mentality will synchronize with another person’s if I’m much in sympathy with them.” And then he asked anxiously: “Mrs. Leicester wasn’t very bad?”
“Oh no,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “it was only that she had come to the resolution of calling in Miss Lascarides.”
“Now, I should have thought it was more than that,” Held said. “I was almost certain that it was something very bitter and unpleasant. One of those thoughts that seem suddenly to wreck one’s whole life.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was more than that,” Robert Grimshaw said; and Mr. Held went on to declare at ecstatic lengths how splendid it would be for Pauline to have Katya in the house, to have someone to confide in, to unbosom herself to, to strengthen her mentality with, and from whom to receive—he was sure she would receive it, since Miss Lascarides was Mrs. Langham’s sister—to receive a deep and clinging affection. Besides, Miss Lascarides having worked in the United States, was certain to have imbibed some of Mrs. Eddy’s doctrine, so that, except for Mr. Leicester’s state, it was, Mr. Held thought, going to be an atmosphere of pure joy in the house. Mrs. Leicester so needed a sister.
Robert Grimshaw sipped his coffee in a rather grim silence. “I wish you’d get me the ‘ABC,’ or look up the trains for Brighton,” he said.
IV
“HERE comes mother and the bad man,” Kitty said from the top of her donkey, and there sure enough to meet them, as they were returning desultorily to lunch along the cliff-top, came Ellida Langham and Robert Grimshaw. Ellida at the best of times was not much of a pedestrian, and the donkey, for all it was large and very nearly white, moved with an engrossed stubbornness that, even when she pulled it, Katya found it difficult to change. On this occasion, however, she did not even pull it, and the slowness of their mutual approach across the green grass high up in the air had the effect of the coming together of two combatant but reluctant forces.