"Thirty-five? You're young enough. I was forty. Have you ever noticed about places——?" He broke off. "I mean—— Well, you know with people. Suppose that you have been very intimate with some one and then you don't see him or her for years, and then you meet again—don't you find yourself suddenly producing the same set of thoughts, emotions, moods that have, perhaps, lain dormant for years, and that only this one person can call from you? And it is the same with places. Sometimes of course in the interval something has died in you or in them, and the second meeting produces nothing. Hands cross over a grave. But if those things haven't died how wonderful to find them all alive again after all those years, how you had forgotten the way they breathed and spoke and had their being; how interesting to find yourself drawn back again into that old current, perilous perhaps, but deep, real after all the shams——"
He broke off. "Places do the same, I think," he said. "If you have the sort of things in you that stir them they produce in their turn their things . . . and always will for your kind . . . a sort of secret society; I believe," he added, suddenly turning on Harkness and looking him in the face, "that Treliss might give you something of the same adventure that it gave me—if you want it to, that is—if you need it. Do you want adventure, romance, something that will pull you right out of yourself and test you, show you whether you are real or no, give you a crisis that will change you for ever? Do you want it?"
Then he added quietly, reflectively. "It changed me more than the war ever did."
"Do I want it?" Harkness was breathing deeply, driven by some excitement that he could not stop to analyse. "I should say so. I want nothing so much. It's just what I need, what I've been looking for——"
"Then go down there. I believe you're just the kind—but go at the right time. There's a night in August when they have a dance, when they dance all round the town. That's the time for you to go. That will liberate you if you throw yourself into it. It's in August. August the—— I'm not quite sure of the date. I'll write to you if you'll give me your address."
Soon afterwards, with a warm clasp of the hand, they parted.
[1]See Maradick at Forty.
VI
Two days later Harkness received a small parcel. Opening it he discovered an old brown-covered book and a letter.
The letter was as follows: