Poppy's expression sweetened, becoming protective, maternal. She leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap; yet there was still a certain tension in her expression, an intensity as of inward excitement in her gaze.
"Tell me things, then," she said, "tell me things about yourself, if the gift of seeing is upon you.—There's no one to overhear. The neighbours on both sides are away for the holidays, thank the powers! and their houses stand empty. While the voices and footsteps down in the road only make us more happily alone. So tell me things, Dominic. I am a trifle stirred up with all this affair of the theatre, and you always quiet me. I'm really a very good child. I deserve a treat. And there are things I dreadfully want to know."
"Alas! there is so absurdly little to tell," Iglesias answered, "that, here and now, in face of my existing sense of life and of vision, I am humbled by my own ignorance and poverty of achievement. That poverty, I suppose, is all the more apparent to me, because twice to-day I have been—so I judge, at least—within measurable distance of bidding farewell to this astonishingly wonderful world and the fashion of it. It comes home to me how little I have seen, how little I have profited, how little I know. I would have liked to leave it; it would be more seemly to do so, having profited more largely by my sojourn here."
Iglesias paused, excitement which his natural sobriety disapproved gaining him, too, through that ache of unrealised beauty. For a moment he struggled with it as with a rising tide, then resigned himself.
"And yet," he added, "in other respects I should not be sorry to hear the hour strike, for curiosity of the unknown is very strong in me. Opportunity may have been narrow, and one may have been balked of high endeavour and rich experience, by lack of talent and by adverse circumstances; but in the supreme, the crowning experience, that of death and all which, for joy or sorrow, lies beyond it, even the most obscure, the most uncultured and untravelled must participate."
"Don't be in too great a deuce of a hurry to satisfy that curiosity, dear man," Poppy put in. "You must contrive to exercise patience for a little while yet, please; always remembering that it is entirely superfluous to run to catch a train which is bound not to start until you are on board of it. And then, too, you see—well, there's me, after all, and I want you."
Iglesias' face grew keen, as he looked at her through that encompassing whiteness of moonlight.
"I am glad of that," he said very quietly, "because you are to me, dear friend, what no other human being has ever yet been. The saddest thing that could happen to me, save loss of faith, would be that you should cease to want me. I only pray God, if it is not self-seeking, that you may continue to want me as long as I live."
"But your religion?" she asked, a point of jealousy pricking her.
"My religion forbids sin, whether of body or mind; forbids violation of the eternal spiritual proportion, by any placing of the creature before the Creator in a man's action or in his heart. But my religion enjoins love and stimulates it; since only through loving can we fulfil the highest possibility of our nature, which is to grow into the likeness of Almighty God."