"I'm the last of the family, you see; I'm the future.... Can't we skip
the preliminaries?" he broke out. "You don't feel that I am a stranger,
do you?" He halted on the verge of the confidence that he found no
barrier in her advanced age. He knew plenty of women of forty who had
never grown up much and who met him on perfectly equal terms. This,
however, was a case by itself. He plunged back into the memories of
Uncle Hugh. He spoke of his charm, his outlook on life, sometimes
curiously veiled, often uncannily clairvoyant; his periods of restless
suffering tending to queer, unsocial impulses; then the flowering of an
interval of hard work and its reward of almost supernatural joy.

"He used to go around in a rainbow," said Hugh, "a sort of holy soap
bubble. I hardly dared to speak to him for fear of breaking it. It came
with a new inspiration, and while it lasted nothing on earth was so
important. Then when it was finished he never wanted to see the thing
again."

"Go on," said his listener. Her grey eyes plumbed his with a child's
directness. He was conscious of his will playing on her. He was keeping
his part of the contract, but he was also breaking the way for hers. He
must not let them go for a moment, those grey eyes like a girl's that
grew absent-minded so easily. Only a little more and his mood would
curve around both them, a glamorous mist of feeling.

"You go on," he murmured. "Can't you see how much I want you to? Can't
you feel how much I'm the right person to know?"

"I could never tell any one. You want--"