Benson was aware that the man had a certain curious distinction. His eyes, dark and deep set under narrow brows, were piercing and compelling; they could burn, too, with a wonderful light, just as his reserve could drop before the wealth of his own emotions, emotions that he could make others feel poignantly, while they yet seemed oddly foreign to the man himself.
“Do you expect to return to Burmah?” asked Benson.
“My absence is only temporary. My labours are not finished there yet; indeed they are only just begun.” With an absorbed air, he continued. “Events made it seem advisable for me to temporarily abandon my work, for only recently I suffered a most serious bereavement in the death of my wife.”
“I regret exceedingly to hear it,” said Benson civilly.
“From the first, when she joined me in the East, where I had preceded her, I doubted if she could endure the climate.”
Benson ventured the opinion that such being the case, he would have abandoned so unpromising a field; but Dr. Stillman merely smiled in a superior way which the lawyer found singularly exasperating.
“Personal considerations should never be allowed to clash with one's manifest duty,” he said.
In truth, he had never spared himself; and he exacted of others quite as much as he gave himself.
“Not if one can always be sure of the manifest duty,” said Benson.
“I was sure.”