"I have heard it advanced. No. It is hard to hold."
"It is like a mighty serpent. You would think you had it and then it is gone.... If one could hold it it would transform the world."
"Yes, it would. At what are you staring?"
"The serpent is gone. I thought that I saw one whom I do not hold to be art and part with me." He gazed after a crossing horseman. "No! There was merely a trick of him. It is some other."
"The man for whom you are waiting?"
"Yes."
Deschamps returned to the subject of a moment before. "It is likely that language bewrays much more than we think it does. I say 'the man.' You echo it. And I am 'man.' And you are 'man.' 'Man'—'Man'! Every instant it is said. Yet the identity that we state we never assume!"
"I said that we could not hold the serpent."
Ten days afterward he did see Ian. The latter, after a slow and difficult progress through France, came afoot into Paris. He sought, and was glad enough to find, an old acquaintance and sometime fellow-conspirator—Warburton.
"Blessed friendship!" he said, and warmed himself by Warburton's fire. Something within him winced, and would, if it could, have put forward a different phrase.