"Why destroying it unread by either of us—which," said Horton, looking about, "I'd do in a jiffy, on the spot, if there were only a fire in that grate. The place is clear, however, and we've matches; let me chuck your letter in and enjoy the blaze with you."
"Ah, my dear man, don't! Don't!" Gray repeated, putting it rather as a plea for indulgence than as any ghost of a defiance, but instinctively stepping backward in defence of his treasure.
His companion, for a little, gazed at the cabinet, in speculation, it might really have seemed, as to an extraordinary reach of arm. "You positively prefer to hug the beastly thing?"
"Let me alone," Gray presently returned, "and you'll probably find I've hugged it to death."
Horton took, however, on his side, a moment for further reflection. "I thought what you wanted of me to be exactly not that I should let you alone, but that I should give you on the contrary my very best attention!"
"Well," Gray found felicity to answer, "I feel that you'll see how your very best attention will sometimes consist in your not at all minding me."
So then for the minute Horton looked as if he took it. The great clock on the mantel appeared to have stopped with the stop of its late owner's life; so that he eyed his watch and startled at the hour to which they had talked. He put out his hand for good-night, and this returned grasp held them together in silence a minute. Something then in his sense of the situation determined his breaking out with an intensity not yet produced in him. "Yes—you're really prodigious. I mean for trust in a fellow. For upon my honour you know nothing whatever about me."
"That's quite what I mean," said Gray—"that I suffer from my ignorance of so much that's important, and want naturally to correct it."
"'Naturally'?" his visitor gloomed.
"Why, I do know this about you, that when we were together with old Roulet at Neuchâtel and, off on our cours that summer, had strayed into a high place, in the Oberland, where I was ass enough to have slid down to a scrap of a dizzy ledge, and so hung helpless over the void, unable to get back, in horror of staying and in greater horror of not, you got near enough to me, at the risk of your life, to lower to me the rope we so luckily had with us and that made an effort of my own possible by my managing to pass it under my arms. You helped that effort from a place of vantage above that nobody but you, in your capacity for playing up, would for a moment have taken for one, and you so hauled and steadied and supported me, in spite of your almost equal exposure, that little by little I climbed, I scrambled, my absolute confidence in you helping, for it amounted to inspiration, and got near to where you were."