“She had,” answered the duke, and an odd expression wavered in his eyes because he was looking backward across forty years which seemed a hundred.
“That's what I meant by moving the world,” T. Tembarom went on. “You know she's RIGHT, and you've got to do what she says, if you love her.”
“And you always do,” said the duke—“always and forever. There are very few. They are the elect.”
T. Tembarom took it gravely.
“I said to her once that there wasn't more than one of her in the world because there couldn't be enough to make two of that kind. I wasn't joshing either; I meant it. It's her quiet little voice and her quiet, babyfied eyes that get you where you can't move. And it's something else you don't know anything about. It's her never doing anything for herself, but just doing it because it's the right thing for you.”
The duke's chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was. The one he remembered had been another man's wife, a little angel brought up in a convent by white-souled nuns, passed over by her people to an elderly vaurien of great magnificence, and she had sent the strong, laughing, impassioned young English peer away before it was too late, and with the young, young eyes of her looking upward at him in that way which saw “straight into a thing” and with that quiet little voice. So long ago! So long ago!
“Ah! Heloise!” he sighed unconsciously.
“What did you say?” asked T. Tembarom. The duke came back.
“I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty,” he answered. “It was not yesterday nor even the day before. The one I knew died when she was twenty-four.”
“Died!” said Tembarom. “Good Lord!” He dropped his head and even changed color. “A fellow can't get on to a thing like that. It seems as if it couldn't happen. Suppose—” he caught his breath hard and then pulled himself up—“Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I've proved what I said—just proved it, and done every single thing she told me to do.”