Wilson chuckled. "Dear me, am I? Out of so many conquests and the spoils
of conquered cities! You've really missed me? Well, then, I shall hang.
Even if you have at last to put ME in the mummy-room with the others.
You'll visit me often, won't you?"
"Every day in the calendar. Here, your cigarettes are in this drawer,
where you left them." She struck a match and lit one for him. "But you
did, after all, enjoy being at home again?"
"Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live a
thousand miles apart. But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the place.
It was in Boston I lingered longest."
"Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?"
"Often. I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times,
I should think. Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on.
I found that I still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if
Bartley were there, somehow, and that at any moment one might hear his
heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be
up in his study." The Professor looked reflectively into the grate. "I
should really have liked to go up there. That was where I had my last
long talk with him. But Mrs. Alexander never suggested it."
"Why?"
Wilson was a little startled by her tone, and he turned his head so
quickly that his cuff-link caught the string of his nose-glasses and
pulled them awry. "Why? Why, dear me, I don't know. She probably never
thought of it."
Hilda bit her lip. "I don't know what made me say that. I didn't mean to
interrupt. Go on please, and tell me how it was."
"Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were there. In a way, he really
is there. She never lets him go. It's the most beautiful and dignified
sorrow I've ever known. It's so beautiful that it has its compensations,
I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation. It gives her
a fixed star to steer by. She doesn't drift. We sat there evening after
evening in the quiet of that magically haunted room, and watched the
sunset burn on the river, and felt him. Felt him with a difference, of
course."
Hilda leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand. "With
a difference? Because of her, you mean?"
Wilson's brow wrinkled. "Something like that, yes. Of course, as
time goes on, to her he becomes more and more their simple personal
relation."