"Oh, it's a fine shade, but I caught it at that moment. I had started to come home. I was tired, and I had insisted on his not coming back with me. We had found some rare flowers--those I brought home--and it was he who had discovered almost all of them. It amused him very much, and I knew he wanted to get more; but I was weary and I quitted him. He let me go--where else would have been his tact?--and I was too stupid then to have guessed that from the moment I was not there no flower would be gathered. I started homeward, but at the end of three minutes I found I had brought away his penknife--he had lent it to me to trim a branch--and I knew he would need it. I turned back a few steps, to call him, but before I spoke I looked about for him. You can't understand what happened then without having the place before you." "You must take me there," I said. "We may see the wonder here. The place was simply one that offered no chance for concealment--a great gradual hillside, without obstructions or trees. There were some rocks below me, behind which I myself had disappeared, but from which on coming back I immediately emerged again." "Then he must have seen you." "He was too utterly gone, for some reason best known to himself. It was probably some moment of fatigue--he's getting on, you know, so that, with the sense of returning solitude, the reaction had been proportionately great, the extinction proportionately complete. At any rate the stage was as bare as your hand." "Could he have been somewhere else?" "He couldn't have been, in the time, anywhere but where I had left him. Yet the place was utterly empty--as empty as this stretch of valley before us. He had vanished--he had ceased to be. But as soon as my voice rang out (I uttered his name), he rose before me like the rising sun." "And where did the sun rise?" "Just where it ought to--just where he would have been and where I should have seen him had he been like other people." I had listened with the deepest interest, but it was my duty to think of objections. "How long a time elapsed between the moment you perceived his absence and the moment you called?" "Oh, only an instant. I don't pretend it was long." "Long enough for you to be sure?" I said. "Sure he wasn't there?" "Yes, and that you were not mistaken, not the victim of some hocus-pocus of your eyesight." "I may have been mistaken, but I don't believe it. At any rate, that's just why I want you to look in his room." I thought a moment. "How _can_ I, when even his wife doesn't dare to?" "She _wants_ to; propose it to her. It wouldn't take much to make her. She does suspect." I thought another moment. "Did he seem to know?" "That I had missed him? So it struck me, but he thought he had been quick enough." "Did you speak of his disappearance?" "Heaven forbid! It seemed to me too strange." "Quite right. And how did he look?"