“He’s not what you or Howland would call intellectual—­“(Bernald writhed at the coupling of the names)—­“not in the least literary; though he told Bob he used to write.  I don’t think, though, it could have been what Howland would call writing.”  Mrs. Wade always mentioned her younger son with a reverential drop of the voice.  She viewed literature much as she did Providence, as an inscrutably mystery; and she spoke of Howland as a dedicated being, set apart to perform secret rites within the veil of the sanctuary.

“I shouldn’t say he had a quick mind,” she continued, reverting apologetically to Winterman.  “Sometimes he hardly seems to follow what we’re saying.  But he’s got such sound ideas—­when he does speak he’s never silly.  And clever people sometimes are, don’t you think so?” Bernald groaned an unqualified assent.  “And he’s so capable.  The other day something went wrong with the kitchen range, just as I was expecting some friends of Bob’s for dinner; and do you know, when Mr. Winterman heard we were in trouble, he came and took a look, and knew at once what to do?  I told him it was a dreadful pity he wasn’t married!”

Close on midnight, when the session on the verandah ended, and the two young men were strolling down to the bungalow at Winterman’s side, Bernald’s mind reverted to the image of the fertilizing cloud.  There was something brooding, pregnant, in the silent presence beside him:  he had, in place of any circumscribing impression of the individual, a large hovering sense of manifold latent meanings.  And he felt a distinct thrill of relief when, half-way down the lawn, Doctor Bob was checked by a voice that called him back to the telephone.

“Now I’ll be with him alone!” thought Bernald, with a throb like a lover’s.

In the low-ceilinged bungalow Winterman had to grope for the lamp on his desk, and as its light struck up into his face Bernald’s sense of the rareness of his opportunity increased.  He couldn’t have said why, for the face, with its ridged brows, its shabby greyish beard and blunt Socratic nose, made no direct appeal to the eye.  It seemed rather like a stage on which remarkable things might be enacted, like some shaggy moorland landscape dependent for form and expression on the clouds rolling over it, and the bursts of light between; and one of these flashed out in the smile with which Winterman, as if in answer to his companion’s thought, said simply, as he turned to fill his pipe:  “Now we’ll talk.”

So he’d known all along that they hadn’t yet—­and had guessed that, with Bernald, one might!

The young man’s glow of pleasure was so intense that it left him for a moment unable to meet the challenge; and in that moment he felt the brush of something winged and summoning.  His spirit rose to it with a rush; but just as he felt himself poised between the ascending pinions, the door opened and Bob Wade plunged in.

“Too bad!  I’m so sorry!  It was from Howland, to say he can’t come to-morrow after all.”  The doctor panted out his news with honest grief.