"I have looked at a good many, Miss Taroone. But the pictures! Some of them are of places I believe I know. I wish I could be a traveller and see what the others are of. Did Mr. Nahum paint them all himself?"
Miss Taroone was sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair, her eyes and face very intent, as always happened when Mr. Nahum's name was mentioned.
"I know very little about them, Simon. When Nahum was younger he used to make pictures of Thrae, and of the woods and valleys hereabouts. There are boxfulls put away. Others are pictures brought back from foreign parts, but many of them, as I believe," she turned her face and looked into a shadowy corner of the room, "are pictures of nothing on earth. He has his two worlds. Take your time. Some day you too, I dare say, will go off on your travels. Remember that, like Nahum, you are as old as the hills which neither spend nor waste time, but dwell in it for ages, as if it were light or sunshine. Some day perhaps Nahum will shake himself free of Thrae altogether. I don't know, myself, Simon. This house is enough for me, and what I remember of Sure Vine, compared with which Thrae is but the smallest of bubbles in a large glass."
I do not profess to have understood one half of what Miss Taroone meant in these remarks. It was in English and yet in a hidden tongue.
But by this time I had grown to be bolder in her company, and pounced on this:—"What, please Miss Taroone, do you mean by the 'two worlds'? Or shall I ask downstairs?" I added the latter question because now and then in the past Miss Taroone had bidden me go down to Linnet Sara for my answers. She now appeared at first not to have heard it.
"Now I must say to you, Simon," she replied at last, folding her hands on her knee, "wherever you may be in that body of yours, you feel you look out of it, do you not?"
I nodded. "Yes, Miss Taroone."
"Now think, then, of Mr. Nahum's round room; where is that?"
"Up there," said I, pointing up a rambling finger.