"He's had to wait, then, six months?" There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity. "Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and then she has a way with her." Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture. "Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway. "It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him." Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves, was as a wild book for him to read. He was sorry for her torture. He lingered. "I'd go and speak to Brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of me, and I can't blame him, poor devil." "It's no matter," she said. "I'll write to Jane Holland." "Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper." He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her. She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina. Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of his own youth. He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves. It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London, lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina Lempriere. The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner room, preparing their supper. There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains. They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen him.