In the charmed contemplation of these possibilities Bernald sat over his fire, listening for Pellerin’s ring.  He had arranged his modest quarters with the reverent care of a celebrant awaiting the descent of his deity.  He guessed Pellerin to be unconscious of visual detail, but sensitive to the happy blending of sensuous impressions:  to the intimate spell of lamplight on books, and of a deep chair placed where one could watch the fire.  The chair was there, and Bernald, facing it across the hearth, already saw it filled by Pellerin’s lounging figure.  The autumn dawn came late, and even now they had before them the promise of some untroubled hours.  Bernald, sitting there alone in the warm stillness of his room, and in the profounder hush of his expectancy, was conscious of gathering up all his sensibilities and perceptions into one exquisitely-adjusted instrument of notation.  Until now he had tasted Pellerin’s society only in unpremeditated snatches, and had always left him with a sense, on his own part, of waste and shortcoming.  Now, in the lull of this dedicated hour, he felt that he should miss nothing, and forget nothing, of the initiation that awaited him.  And catching sight of Pellerin’s pipe, he rose and laid it carefully on a table by the arm-chair.

“No.  I’ve never had any news of him,” Bernald heard himself repeating.  He spoke in a low tone, and with the automatic utterance that alone made it possible to say the words.

They were addressed to Miss Fosdick, into whose neighbourhood chance had thrown him at a dinner, a year or so later than their encounter at the Uplift Club.  Hitherto he had successfully, and intentionally, avoided Miss Fosdick, not from any animosity toward that unconscious instrument of fate, but from an intense reluctance to pronounce the words which he knew he should have to speak if they met.

Now, as it turned out, his chief surprise was that she should wait so long to make him speak them.  All through the dinner she had swept him along on a rapid current of talk which showed no tendency to linger or turn back upon the past.  At first he ascribed her reserve to a sense of delicacy with which he reproached himself for not having previously credited her; then he saw that she had been carried so far beyond the point at which they had last faced each other, that it was by the merest hazard of associated ideas that she was now finally borne back to it.  For it appeared that the very next evening, at Mrs. Beecher Bain’s, a Hindu Mahatma was to lecture to the Uplift Club on the Limits of the Subliminal; and it was owing to no less a person than Howland Wade that this exceptional privilege had been obtained.