Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/59

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IV

'David, dear,' she observed gently as soon as they were alone upstairs, 'I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get rid of it.' The tremor in per voice caught all his tenderness.

He turned to look at her. 'Of what kind, my dear? You're so imaginative sometimes, aren't you?'

'I think,' she hesitated, stammering a little, confused, still frightened, 'I mean—isn't he a hypnotist, or full of those theosophical ideas, or something of the sort? You know what I mean—'

He was too accustomed to her little confused alarms to explain them away seriously as a rule, or to correct her verbal inaccuracies, but to-night he felt she needed careful, tender treatment. He soothed her as best he could.

'But there's no harm in that, even if he is,' he answered quietly. 'Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear.' There was no trace of impatience in his voice.

'That's what I mean,' she replied, the texts he dreaded rising in an unuttered crowd behind the words. 'He's one of those things that we are warned would come—one of those Latter-Day things.' For her mind still bristled with the bogeys of the Antichrist and Prophecy, and she had only escaped