Their greeting was cordial. “Oh, man of silences, oh, thou unlettered one, do I find thee in truth?”
“My dear Doctor Löffner, you do indeed. Come into the yard and I’ll show you some things worth having.”
“Where have you been, my friend?”
“Iceland.”
“Iceland! Ach, then you haf—? No, you haf not—? Never in the worlt!”
“I’m not sure. But I rather think that I have.” What he had was some earth and broken limestone in a sponge-bag—so far as could be seen. But there was enough beside to occupy the pair of them until dinner. Before that meal was ready the Doctor had fallen weeping on Senhouse’s neck, had clasped him to his breast. “Thou hast it—thou hast it—oh, wonder-child!”—and then, as he wiped the dew from his glasses, with a startling lapse into idiom—“I say! Dot was cholly.”
The dinner was very gay; Bingo had an indigestion.
Next morning, the great man was taken out and about to view the various fields of tillage; the ledge where calochortus had been fair in Mary’s eyes, the larkspur slope, and what could be done with Alpines upon a Cumberland moraine. He was more than amazed, he was convinced. “You are chust the man for us. We pick you up cheap, I consider, for ten thousand mark.” Senhouse was not concerned to affirm or deny; but he insisted upon it that he was selling his liberty very cheaply indeed. “And I wouldn’t do it, you know, for a hundred thousand,” he said, “if it weren’t for the two years in the Caucasus. You have me there, I own. I’ve hungered after that for years, and now I’ll take it as it comes to me. There must be irises there which neither Leichtlin nor Korolkov have spotted—I’m certain of it.”
“And you are the man to spod them,” said Herr Löffner with deep feeling. “Bod, mind you, we haf them wid you in Schwarzwald.”
“Honour among thieves,” said Senhouse. “Depend upon me.”