For the next three-quarters of an hour I had Pogson at his best. And oh! how vastly good that same best was! Under the flashing, multi-coloured light of it, he routed my suspicions; put my annoyance and distrust to flight. As he leaned back in the roomy library chair, filled to veritable overflowing by his big, squashy, brown-velvet jacketted person—Pogson had put on flesh of late; put it on sensibly, as I remarked, even during the few weeks of my absence—he reconquered all my admiration and belief.
As I rose to depart:
"Ah! you fortunate youth," he thus genially addressed me; "thrice fortunate youth, in your freedom, your enterprise, your happy elasticity of flesh and spirit! What won't you have to tell me of things actually seen, of lands, cities, civilizations, past and present, and the storied wonder of them, when you come back!"
"And what won't you have to read to me in return, dear Master," I echoed, eager to testify to my recovered faith. "By then the book will be finished on which all our hopes and affections are set. Ten times more precious, more illuminating than anything I have seen, will be what I hear from you when I come back!"
But, as I spoke, surely I wasn't mistaken in thinking that for an agitating minute the pinkness of Pogson's large countenance sickly ebbed and blanched. And while my attention was still engaged by this disquieting phenomenon, I became aware that Mrs. Pogson had joined us. Silently, mysteriously, she faded—the term holds good—into evidence, as on so many former occasions she had silently, mysteriously faded out.
Dressed in one of those verdant gowns, so dolorously veiled in semi-transparent black, she stood behind her husband's chair. Her eyes met mine. They were no longer nervous or in expression vague; but oddly aggressive, challenging, defiantly alight.
"Oh, yes," she declared, "by then Heber will have completed his great novel, without doubt."
When uttering his name, she laid a thin, long-fingered hand upon his rounded shoulder, and to my—little short of—stupefaction, I saw Pogson's fat, pink hand move up to seek and clasp it.
On me this action—hers soothing, protective; his appealing, welcoming—produced the most bewildering effect. I felt embarrassed and abashed; an indecently impertinent intruder upon the secret places of two human hearts. That any such intimate and tender correspondence existed between this so strangely ill-assorted couple I never dreamed.
I uttered what must have sounded wildly incoherent farewells and fled.