"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all life comes from lovers." At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange thing was it seemed to frighten him. We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited--holding breath. Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors, Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room. "What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I asked, I thought I knew. CHAPTER XXIII ERIC'S SECRET My sister and I breakfasted in the morning-room in those days, and we always had a fire for Bettina's sake on chilly mornings. In the back of my mind I was hoping Eric's complaint of cold was an excuse. If my first impression had been right, if he had something to tell me, he would tell it better indoors. I should hear it better, sitting beside him. The pang when he passed the sofa by! I was wrong.... I was an idiot.... He drew up before the ungenerous little fire and began at once to speak with suppressed excitement of a "secret." "----the sort of thing that--well, I wouldn't trust my own brother with it." And upon that he stopped short. I did not say: "You can trust me." But I hardly breathed in the pause. I felt it all hung on whether he told me. What hung? Why, everything--whether life was going to be kind to me some day ... whether it was well or ill that I had been born. He seemed to be content with having told me there was a secret. For he changed the subject abruptly to the Bungalow, and what an adept Bootle was at inoculation and the preparation of cultures. Bootle possessed the great and glorious faculty of accuracy! One of the few men on earth whose account of a thing did not need to be checked. Sitting over the fire that morning, Eric told me that the Bungalow was a laboratory. Very important work had been done there last autumn. (So _that_ was why he had stayed on!) "Tentative but highly significant results" had been arrived at--results which all these months of contest and putting to proof, in London and on the Continent, had not been able to upset.