“I am hardly Celt enough for that. But I am a sort of a seer, after all—from an instinct of the spiritual relations of things, I hope; not in the least from the nervo-material side.”
“I think I understand you.”
“Are you at leisure?”
“Entirely.”
“Had we not better walk, then? I have to go as far as Somers Town—no great way; and we can talk as well walking as sitting.”
“With pleasure,” answered Hugh, rising.
“Will you take anything before you go? A glass of port? It is the only wine I happen to have.”
“Not a drop, thank you. I seldom taste anything stronger than water.”
“I like that. But I like a glass of port too. Come then.”
And Falconer rose—and a great rising it was; for, as I have said, he was two or three inches taller than Hugh, and much broader across the shoulders; and Hugh was no stripling now. He could not help thinking again of his old friend, David Elginbrod, to whom he had to look up to find the living eyes of him, just as now he looked up to find Falconer’s. But there was a great difference between those organs in the two men. David’s had been of an ordinary size, pure keen blue, sparkling out of cerulean depths of peace and hope, full of lambent gleams when he was loving any one, and ever ready to be dimmed with the mists of rising emotion. All that Hugh could yet discover of Falconer’s eyes was, that they were large, and black as night, and set so far back in his head, that each gleamed out of its caverned arch like the reversed torch of the Greek Genius of Death, just before going out in night. Either the frontal sinus was very large, or his observant faculties were peculiarly developed.