V
I
The Professor came in upon us after twelve o'clock lunch, one mild October day, when we were standing together, outside the study, leaning over the balcony-rails and watching the aerial manœuvres of two martins.
'I am glad to see you,' I said, holding his hand and looking into his face. Then turning to Rosy, who had drawn back on the sudden appearance of this stranger by my side, I explained:
'This is the friend for whose sake I wished our house to be ready—Professor Strachan.'
Rosy put out a timid hand, and said blushingly and softly:
'I am glad to see you, sir! '
The Professor smiled—who could help it?—and then gave an odd glance at me which I rejected, and that, I think, dismissed some invisible commonplace trouble of ours into the outer air, and he and I were in some way more really friends than we ever had been before.
He stayed in Paris for eight or nine days, during which I had the pleasure of going with the Rosebud and him to see the plays which were the best worth seeing. Those evenings were happy ones. He and the child took to one another, quite remarkably: and therein perhaps lay the happiness of those evenings—at least to me—to sit still and listen to their talk, with a certain half-dreaminess in my thoughts of them, and with a certain half-wonder in the half-dreaminess. I remember how particularly this feeling came to me the last night he was with us (at the Gymnase it was), and how it dominated me all the way home, and how, looking into his eyes, as after supper he said good-
