"Do I?" asked Mocket, with emphasis. "There's nothing happened to make me forget."
"A man cannot weave a net so fine that some minnow will not slip through and become leviathan! It escaped and has grown. Well, that too was in the nature of things." He took the ash-stick from the corner of the hearth and handled it as though he were again holding down burning papers. "So things are all right at Williamsburgh? I had a happy home-coming."
"You always have that," said Tom simply. "You've had a wonderful fortune, and more there than anywhere. I'm always telling Vinie—"
"Vinie!" answered the other. "Vinie would always blindly worship on. The sun might darken and go out, but where's the odds since she would never know it! Faith like a dog's or a child's or Vinie's—there's comfort there! But the awakened mind, and Judgment side by side upon the throne with Love—Oh, there's verjuice in the world!" He broke into harsh laughter.
"I wish I knew what ailed you," thought Mocket. "I'll try another tack." He stopped whittling and turned from his desk. "Coming out of the Capitol, I heard Ludwell Cary say that he goes next week to Albemarle."
"It is indifferent to me," replied the other, "whether he goes or stays." His hands closed upon the ash-stick until his nails were white. Suddenly he spoke without apparent relevance. "He is one of those men who are summoned in time of trouble—when the mind is tossed and the heart is wavering. They always answer—they come down the street at night, between the box bushes, up the steps beneath the honeysuckle—on such an errand they would not fear the lion's den! They are magnanimous, they are generous, they are out of our old life, they can tell us what we ought to do!" He struck the ash-stick violently against the hearth. "Honeysuckle and box and the quiet of the night, and 'Yes, I knew, I knew. 'Twas thus and so, and I would counsel you—' Oh, world's end and hell-fire! forgiveness itself grows worthless on such terms!"
He threw the stick from him, rose abruptly, and walked to the window.
"The clouds pile up, but they do not break, and the heat and fever of this August air grow intolerable. To abstract the mind—to abstract the mind"—He stood listening to the locusts and all the indefinable hum of the downward-drawing afternoon, then turned to Tom. "Give me those Winchester papers. Now what, exactly, did you do in Williamsburgh?"