"Why, Will! Why, Will..." I murmured. I seemed to feel myself on the edge of something very big and cloudy and confusing, but very necessary, somehow, to be understood. The trap he had led me into so neatly had fastened softly, but with almost an actual click, upon me.
"What—what is his miracle?" I inquired, in a subdued voice. I was beginning to feel a little afraid of this boy of ours.
"I had hoped he'd tell you himself. He will, if you ask him.... We ought to go and dress, oughtn't we?"
There was no more to be got out of him that night: he was passionately fond of music and had no mind to lose the prelude to Tristan.
But through all that evening the big, shadowy something he had stirred up in my mind grew and grew and troubled me increasingly.
"A poor miracle, but his own..." it haunted me. I went up with him again in two days' time, as he had expected me to, I have no doubt.
In the little room with the gold fish and the Franklin grate everything was the same except that the piled linen on the table was new: it was being listed and stamped. And at the little desk in the corner, his gloves and stick beside him on the floor, sat Absolom Vail, the hardware king, in a pepper-and-salt suit.
"I brought my nephew up with me and thought I'd look in for another little chat, Mr. Vail," I said. The housekeeper lifted her unfathomable eyes to mine for a moment, then dropped them.
"Six dozen snow-drop twenty-eight inch breakfast napkins," she said quietly, but my mind received—I cannot explain how—a totally different impression from what the sound of these words conveyed. Afterward, I realized that I thought suddenly of the sea, great clouds, unheard of, enormous fish, and myself driving like the wind across high, tumbling waves ... it was extraordinary. I had been literally lost in her eyes.
"Always glad to see the doctor's friends," he chirped, and soon, as Will had said, he was talking.