“Still,” Gerald said, “you have played in large historical events a strange high part; you have known all the very best people: and you must have much of interest to tell me about. You, sir, at least shall dine with me, since my friend here is obdurate. My wife avoids the usual run of gods, but to devils I have never heard her voice the slightest objection. So, if you will do me the honor to accompany me to my temporary home, in that cottage—”
But the brown man smiled. And he excused himself.
“For your wife and I are not wholly strangers. And the circumstances in which we last parted were, I confess, a bit awkward. So I really believe it would be more pleasant, for everyone concerned, for me not to meet your wife just now. Do you present, none the less, my compliments.”
“And whose compliments shall I tell her that they are?”
“Do you say a friend of her earliest youth passed by, one somewhat intimately known to her before she first became a mother; and I make no doubt that Havvah will understand.”
“But my wife’s married name is Maya, and before our marriage it was Æsred—”
“Ah, yes!” the brown man said, precisely as Glaum had done, “women do vary in their given names. Do you present my compliments, then, to your wife: for that word, by and by, means the same thing to every husband.”
“I will convey the message,” Gerald promised: “but the aphorism I would prefer to have delivered by somebody else.”
And he so parted with both his guests.
For Gaston Bulmer embraced Gerald and then went sorrowfully back to Lichfield, in a cloud which the aging adept’s despondency made quite black: and the brown man leisurely strolled on toward Antan, with the ease of one who was well used to walking to and fro about the earth.