"How beautiful it is!" he said, in a tone that was half greeting, half meditation. The start with which Dr. Harrison heard him was skilfully transformed into a natural change of position.
"Beautiful?—yes," said he. "Has the beauty driven Motley away?"
"He is gone.—Your waves are very dazzling to-night, doctor."
"They are helping us on," said the doctor looking at them. "We shall be in after two days more—if this holds."
Helping us on—perhaps the thought was not unqualified in Mr. Linden's mind, for he considered that—or something else—in grave silence for a minute or two.
"Dr. Harrison," he said suddenly, "you asked me about my course—I wish you would tell me yours. Towards what—for what. You bade me call myself a friend—may I use a friend's privilege?" He spoke with a grave, frank earnestness.
The doctor's face shewed but a small part of the astonishment which this speech raised. It shewed a little.
"I can be but flattered!—" he said with something of the old graceful medium between play and earnest. "You ask me what I am hardly wise enough to answer you. I am going to Paris, and you to Germany. After that, I really know about as much of one 'course' as of the other."
"My question referred, not to the little daily revolutions, but to the great life orbit. Harrison, what is yours to be?"
Evidently it was an uneasy question. Yet the power of influence—or of associations—was such that Dr. Harrison did not fling it away. "I remember," he said, not without some bitterness of accent—"you once did me the honour to profess to care."