"Unless we overtake him," I subjoined. "In that case we shall find him producing one, in the most graceful attitude, and the queer thing is that it will be brilliant."
"Let us leave him alone--he'll have to come home without it."
"He'd rather never come home. Oh, he'll find a public!"
"Perhaps he'll do it for the cows," Blanche Adney suggested; and as I was on the point of rebuking her profanity she went on: "That's simply what I happened to discover."
"That's all it was--that I was like Lady Mellifont: I couldn't find him."
"He lost _me_--that appears to be the way of it. He thought I was gone."
"But you did find him, since you came home with him."
"It was he who found _me_. That again is what must happen. He's there from the moment he knows somebody else is."
"I understand his intermissions," I said after a short reflection, "but I don't quite seize the law that governs them."
"Oh, it's a fine shade, but I caught it at that moment. I had started to come home. I was tired, and I had insisted on his not coming back with me. We had found some rare flowers--those I brought home--and it was he who had discovered almost all of them. It amused him very much, and I knew he wanted to get more; but I was weary and I quitted him. He let me go--where else would have been his tact?--and I was too stupid then to have guessed that from the moment I was not there no flower would be gathered. I started homeward, but at the end of three minutes I found I had brought away his penknife--he had lent it to me to trim a branch--and I knew he would need it. I turned back a few steps, to call him, but before I spoke I looked about for him. You can't understand what happened then without having the place before you."
"We may see the wonder here. The place was simply one that offered no chance for concealment--a great gradual hillside, without obstructions or trees. There were some rocks below me, behind which I myself had disappeared, but from which on coming back I immediately emerged again."
"He was too utterly gone, for some reason best known to himself. It was probably some moment of fatigue--he's getting on, you know, so that, with the sense of returning solitude, the reaction had been proportionately great, the extinction proportionately complete. At any rate the stage was as bare as your hand."