Helen glanced at him. His words whipped up her sense of drama, fed her excitement. But she bent her eyes upon the crystal again, and the hush descended once more, disturbed only by that nervous tapping of rain.
"I see nothing, nothing," she said presently. "And there is much I would give very much to see."
"You must gaze with a simple intention." The young man's voice came curiously hoarse and broken. "Purify your mind of all desire."
Helen did not raise her head.
"Alas! if those are the conditions of revelation my chances of seeing are extremely limited. To purify one's mind of all desire is to commit emotional suicide. Of course I desire, all the while I desire. And equally, of course, you desire. Every one who is human and in their sober senses must do that. Absence of desire means idiotcy, or——"
"Or what?"
For an instant she looked up at him, a very devil of dainty malice in her expression, in the shrug of her shoulders too, beneath their fine laces and the affected sobriety of that same dull-blue, poplin gown.
"Or priestly, saintly middle-age—from which may heaven in its mercy ever deliver us," she said.
Richard shifted his position a little, gathering himself back from her so near neighbourhood—a fact of which the young lady was not unaware.
"I'm not quite sure whether I echo your prayer," he said slowly. "I doubt whether that attitude, or one approximate to it, is not the safest and best for some of us."