“Oh, no.  I’m pulling myself together.  Getting back to work is the slowest part of the business:  not on account of my eyes—­I can use them now, though not for reading; but some of the links between things are missing.  It’s a kind of broken spectrum ... here, that boy will look after your bag.”

The walk through the woods remained in Bernald’s memory as an enchanted hour.  He used the word literally, as descriptive of the way in which Winterman’s contact changed the face of things, or perhaps restored them to their primitive meanings.  And the scene they traversed—­one of those little untended woods that still, in America, fringe the tawdry skirts of civilization—­acquired, as a background to Winterman, the hush of a spot aware of transcendent visitings.  Did he talk, or did he make Bernald talk?  The young man never knew.  He recalled only a sense of lightness and liberation, as if the hard walls of individuality had melted, and he were merged in the poet’s deeper interfusion, yet without losing the least sharp edge of self.  This general impression resolved itself afterward into the sense of Winterman’s wide elemental range.  His thought encircled things like the horizon at sea.  He didn’t, as it happened, touch on lofty themes—­Bernald was gleefully aware that, to Howland Wade, their talk would hardly have been Talk at all—­but Winterman’s mind, applied to lowly topics, was like a powerful lens that brought out microscopic delicacies and differences.

The lack of Sunday trains kept Doctor Bob for two days on the scene of his surgical duties, and during those two days Bernald seized every moment of communion with his friend’s guest.  Winterman, as Wade had said, was reticent as to his personal affairs, or rather as to the practical and material conditions to which the term is generally applied.  But it was evident that, in Winterman’s case, the usual classification must be reversed, and that the discussion of ideas carried one much farther into his intimacy than any specific acquaintance with the incidents of his life.

“That’s exactly what Howland Wade and his tribe have never understood about Pellerin:  that it’s much less important to know how, or even why, he disapp—­”

Bernald pulled himself up with a jerk, and turned to look full at his companion.  It was late on the Monday evening, and the two men, after an hour’s chat on the verandah to the tune of Mrs. Wade’s knitting-needles, had bidden their hostess good-night and strolled back to the bungalow together.

“Come and have a pipe before you turn in,” Winterman had said; and they had sat on together till midnight, with the door of the bungalow open on a heaving moonlit bay, and summer insects bumping against the chimney of the lamp.  Winterman had just bent down to re-fill his pipe from the jar on the table, and Bernald, jerking about to catch him in the yellow circle of lamplight, sat speechless, staring at a fact that seemed suddenly to have substituted itself for Winterman’s face, or rather to have taken on its features.