“Oh!” she cried fiercely, great longing fluting her voice—she was more intensely nervous than her companion had ever seen any one before, and he had seen hundreds of untried boys on the eve of battle—“Oh! it must be so. Why should the same thought come to us both—you at the front—I in London—come—so—vividly? And without any reason!—I am sure it’s Daddy.”
At the sight of her exaltation all his cocksure masculinity reasserted itself. He laid a patronizing, affectionate hand on her arm. “Don’t distress yourself with this, dear,” he said soothingly, “I can’t let you. Our both having the same feeling must have been only a coincidence.”
She shook off his hand with gentle impatience, the sex impatience of quick woman with man’s dullness, a delicate rage as old as the Garden of Eden. “No, no,” she said chidingly. “It wasn’t only that—it wasn’t only that.”
Her earnestness shook him a little—and perhaps his wish did too: any port in a storm, even a supernatural one!
“But if Uncle Dick could bring us to this room,” he asked slowly, “why doesn’t he show us what to do?”
“He will,” she said—almost sternly—“he will—now that he has brought us here—why, that proves it! Don’t you see? I see!—now that he has brought us here—He will come to us.” She sank down into a low chair near the writing-table, her eyes rapt, riveted on space.
Again masculine superiority reasserted itself, and something creature-love, and chivalry too—jostling aside the “almost I am persuaded” that the moment before had cried in his soul, and Hugh put a pitying hand on her shoulder, saying,
“I don’t want to make you unhappy, Helen, but that’s impossible.” Thought-transference, spiritual-wireless—um—well, perhaps—but ghosts!—perish the folly!
Helen looked up, and, at something in her face, he took his hand from her shoulder. The girl shivered. And in another moment the khaki-clad man shivered too—rather violently. “How cold it is here,” he said, and repeated somewhat dreamily—“How cold!”
“Yes,” Helen echoed in an unnatural voice, “cold.”