"So will you be one day."
"Perhaps I am old already. Do not mock at my poor grey hairs! But I wonder if I want to wait until I am as old as your Great-Aunt for some one to look after me. Young men want looking after, Miss Traies, as well as old women. Old age is lonely, but youth is lonelier. Perhaps there are younger folk than your good Grandmother and Great-Aunt whom you could help. There are men in the world too."
"I know," I said, realizing that in speaking aloud of my love of Robbie for the first time in all the years I should be doing the kindest thing to my dear friend the Stranger, and should at the same time be bringing that love magically nearer reality. For if I spoke of him, he was real: to utter his name to another human being made him suddenly part of this visible world. From this uttering of his name to meeting him was but a matter of hours—days. Devon was a little place: green fields and red loam flashed quickly past: as I spoke of him I saw him coming nearer. "I know—maybe there is a man in the world I shall help—help him for all his life."
I could not look.
"Do I know him?" he asked. His voice was odd, toneless: steadied by supernatural effort: nearest despair, though still caressing hope.
"No," I replied shortly.
In the silence that followed I could see nothing, think nothing; hear nothing but my own negation ringing in my ears, harsher and more brutal as each second passed.
My cruelty filled me with exquisite pity: the insolent eternal offering from the soul that is not suffering to the soul that is. Poor heart, it could not be! My eyes were my chief difficulty: but the carriage window held resources. He went back to his Times.
Odd, crowding sensations overcame me as the train drew up in Tawborough station, the same to which, once upon a time, Satan Had Come—and the North Devon odour (western, immemorial, unmistakable: the smell of broad tidal rivers that are the sea, yet not the sea) filled my nostrils. We drove across the bridge: for the first moment the bright town spread out before me across the river wore the cardboard strangeness of a foreign land. There was an almost imperceptible instant of confusion, while my senses adjusted themselves to the changed physical world, and then the buildings around me—we had crossed the bridge by now—seemed normal, inevitable; and France was a dream I had to struggle to remember.
The same odd moment of physically-felt spiritual adjustment was repeated at the house, where my Grandmother stood at the gate of Number Eight to greet me. It was not so much that she was frailer, thinner, older, it was that she was a different person, or rather that the I who now beheld her was a different person from the I who had known her before, and to the new me she was a new creature. As I kissed her the years rolled back, my own self changed, and she was Grandmother of old.