"Yes," said the professor, "from a child to a woman. And yet, when you look back upon it, eight years is a very short time. Sometimes it seems only yesterday that she startled me at the dinner-table by saying that she expected me to classify and label her."
"There have been times," said Tredennis, "when it seemed only yesterday to me; but to-night it is something far away."
The professor looked up at him quickly.
"Is it?" he said. "Well, well," rather vaguely, "it is a habit they have fallen into, that of making light of things. It is a kind of fashion nowadays. She did not treat things lightly then, did she? How she believed all that she believed—how frankly she impugned your veracity in argument, without being at all conscious of the incivility! How bright her eyes and lips were when she asked me if she could not have the label without the pin! I wish"—
He stopped suddenly once more.
"We have reached the end of the block again, my boy," he said, "and I have walked long enough, and talked long enough. We must say good-night to each other."
They were standing beneath a street-lamp, and having looked up at Tredennis to say this, he drew back a pace to look again, in whimsically gentle admiration of his stalwart proportions.
"What a soldierly fellow you are!" he said; "and how you stand out among the rest of us!" And then, with an odd change of manner, he drew nearer, and laid his hand on his shoulder once more. "I'll say again," he said, "what I have said before. I wish you had been a son of mine, my boy."
And, as he said it, there fell upon the quiet of the street the sound of approaching footsteps ringing on the pavement, and, turning instinctively toward them, each saw an easily recognized masculine figure, which, reaching the house in which the Amorys lived, paused for a moment beneath the lighted window, and flung forth to the night, airily, and by no means unmusically, a few bars of one of the popular airs from a gay French opera, and then, crossing the street, applied a latch-key to the door of the opposite house, and, entering, closed it.
"The fellow has a pleasant voice," said the professor. "It is a voice you like to hear. And that is one of his whims."