The next minute the door opened, and Hilary entered.
“She has not come,” said Mr. Stone; and Bianca murmured:
“Her eyes,” said Mr. Stone, “have a peculiar look; they help me to see into the future. I have noticed the same look in the eyes of female dogs.”
With a little laugh, Bianca murmured again:
“There is one virtue in dogs,” said Hilary, “which human beings lack--they are incapable of mockery.”
But Bianca's lips, parted, indrawn, seemed saying: 'You ask too much! I no longer attract you. Am I to sympathise in the attraction this common little girl has for you?'
Mr. Stone's gaze was fixed intently on the wall.
“The dog,” he said, “has lost much of its primordial character.”
And, moving to his desk, he took up his quill pen.
Hilary and Bianca made no sound, nor did they look at one another; and in this silence, so much more full of meaning than any talk, the scratching of the quill went on. Mr. Stone put it down at last, and, seeing two persons in the room, read:
“'Looking back at those days when the doctrine of evolution had reached its pinnacle, one sees how the human mind, by its habit of continual crystallisations, had destroyed all the meaning of the process. Witness, for example, that sterile phenomenon, the pagoda of 'caste'! Like this Chinese building, so was Society then formed. Men were living there in layers, as divided from each other, class from class---'” He took up the quill, and again began to write.
“You understand, I suppose,” said Hilary in a low voice, “that she has been told not to come?”
With a most unwonted look of anger, he added:
“Is it within the scope of your generosity to credit me with the desire to meet your wishes?”
Bianca's answer was a laugh so strangely hard, so cruelly bitter, that Hilary involuntarily turned, as though to retrieve the sound before it reached the old man's ears.
Mr. Stone had laid down his pen. “I shall write no more to-day,” he said; “I have lost my feeling--I am not myself.” He spoke in a voice unlike his own.
Very tired and worn his old figure looked; as some lean horse, whose sun has set, stands with drooped head, the hollows in his neck showing under his straggling mane. And suddenly, evidently quite oblivious that he had any audience, he spoke: