it now as they have many others. Thanks to wretched novelists, the railway company and char-a-bancs, Cornwall and Glebeshire are ruined. No, I dare not go back."
"Was it very beautiful?" Harkness asked.
"Yes. Beautiful? Oh yes. Wonderful. But it wasn't that. Something happened to me there." [1]
"So that you dare not go back?"
"Yes. Dare is the word. I believe that the same thing would happen again. And I'm too old to stand it. In my case now it would be ludicrous. It was nearly ludicrous then." Harkness said nothing. "How old are you? If it isn't an impertinence"
"Thirty-five? You're young enough. I was forty. Have you ever noticed about places?" He broke off. "I mean Well, you know with people. Suppose that you have been very intimate with some one and then you don't see him or her for years, and then you meet again—don't you find yourself suddenly producing the same set of thoughts, emotions, moods that have, perhaps, lain dormant for years, and that only this one person can call from you? And it is the same with places. Sometimes of course in the interval something has died in you or in them, and the second meeting produces nothing. Hands cross over a grave. But if those things haven't died how wonderful to find
- ↑ See Maradick at Forty.
