‘Just the same. Yes, I am, Avice,’ he answered sadly; for this inability to ossify with the rest of his generation threw him out of proportion with the time. Moreover, while wearing the aspect of comedy, it was of the nature of tragedy.
‘It is well to be you, sir,’ she went on. ‘I have had troubles to take the bloom off me!’
‘Yes; I have been sorry for you.’
She continued to regard him curiously, with humorous interest; and he knew what was passing in her mind: that this man, to whom she had formerly looked up as to a person far in advance of her along the lane of life, seemed now to be a well-adjusted contemporary, the pair of them observing the world with fairly level eyes.
He had come to her with warmth for a vision which, on reaching her, he found to have departed; and, though fairly weaned by the natural reality, he was so far staunch as to linger hankeringly. They talked of past days, his old attachment, which she had then despised, being now far more absorbing and present to her than to himself.
She unmistakably won upon him as he sat on. A curious closeness between them had been produced in his imagination by the discovery that she was passing her life within the house of his own childhood. Her similar surname meant little here; but it was also his, and, added to the identity of domicile, lent a strong suggestiveness to the accident.
‘This is where I used to sit when my parents occupied the house,’ he said, placing himself beside that corner of the fireplace which commanded a view through the window. ‘I could see a bough of tamarisk wave outside at that time, and, beyond the bough, the same abrupt grassy waste towards the sea, and at night the same old lightship blinking far out there. Place yourself on the spot, to please me.’
She set her chair where he indicated, and Pierston stood close beside her, directing her gaze to the familiar objects he had regarded thence as a boy. Her head and face—the latter thoughtful and worn enough, poor thing, to suggest a married life none too comfortable—were close to his breast, and, with a few inches further incline, would have touched it.
‘And now you are the inhabitant; I the visitor,’ he said. ‘I am glad to see you here—so glad, Avice! You are fairly well provided for—I think I may assume that?’ He looked round the room at the solid mahogany furniture, and at the modern piano and show bookcase.
‘Yes, Ike left me comfortable. ‘Twas he who thought of moving from my cottage to this larger house. He bought it, and I can live here as long as I choose to.’