There was something in his inscrutable service that, making him almost august, gave my dissimulated eagerness the sound of a heartless compliment. _I_ stood for the hollow chatter of the vulgar world, and he--oh, he was as serious as he was conscious; which was enough. "She says you'll know what she wishes--and she was sure I'd find you here. So I may tell her you'll come?" His courtesy half broke my heart. "Why, my dear man, with all the pleasure----! So many thousand thanks. I'll be with her." "Thanks to _you_. She'll be down. Good-night." He looked round the room--at the two or three clusters of men, smoking, engaged, contented, on their easy seats and among their popped corks; he looked over an instant at Ford Obert, whose eyes, I thought, he momentarily held. It was absolutely as if, for me, he were seeking such things--out of what was closing over him--for the last time. Then he turned again to the door, which, just not to fail humanly to accompany him a step, I had opened. On the other side of it I took leave of him. The passage, though there was a light in the distance, was darker than the smoking-room, and I had drawn the door to. "Good-night, Brissenden. I shall be gone to-morrow before you show." I shall never forget the way that, struck by my word, he let his white face fix me in the dusk. "'Show'? _What_ do I show?" I had taken his hand for farewell, and, inevitably laughing, but as the falsest of notes, I gave it a shake. "You show nothing! You're magnificent." He let me keep his hand while things unspoken and untouched, unspeakable and untouchable, everything that had been between us in the wood a few hours before, were between us again. But so we could only leave them, and, with a short, sharp "Good-bye!" he completely released himself. With my hand on the latch of the closed door I watched a minute his retreat along the passage, and I remember the reflection that, before rejoining Obert, I made on it. I seemed perpetually, at Newmarch, to be taking his measure from behind. Ford Obert has since told me that when I came back to him there were tears in my eyes, and I didn't know at the moment how much the words with which he met me took for granted my consciousness of them. "He looks a hundred years old!" "Oh, but you should see his shoulders, always, as he goes off! _Two_ centuries--ten! Isn't it amazing?" It was so amazing that, for a little, it made us reciprocally stare. "I should have thought," he said, "that he would have been on the contrary----" "Visibly rejuvenated? So should I. I must make it out," I added. "I _shall_." But Obert, with less to go upon, couldn't wait. It was wonderful, for that matter--and for all I had to go upon--how I myself could. I did so, at this moment, in my refreshed intensity, by the help of confusedly lighting another cigarette, which I should have no time to smoke. "I should have thought," my friend continued, "that he too might have changed back."