"
Hugh's hand shut. "He always called it that. Was he thinking of it even
then?"
"Oh yes!"
"He never was like a person of this world," said Hugh, under his breath.
"The loneliest creature I ever knew."
They fell silent, like two old friends whose sorrow is the same.
"He believed," Hugh went on, after a moment, "that when life became
intolerable you had a perfect right to take the shortest way out. And he
thought of it as a little green gate, swinging with its shadow in the
twilight so that a touch would let you into the sweetest, dimmest old
garden."
"But he loved life."
"Sometimes. The colour of it and the unexpectedness. He believed the
word didn't have any definite plan, but just wandered along the road and
picked up adventures. And he loved that. He said God made a new earth
every day and he rather fancied a new heaven oftener. But he got so
dead tired at the end, homesick for the underground.... I wonder ..."
The little woman was looking past him, straight into an evocation of a
vanished presence that was so real, so nearly tangible, that Hugh was
forced to lay violent hands upon his absurd impulse to glance over his
shoulder "I wouldn't let him," she said, in a tone the young man had
never heard before.
"You mean ..."
"I couldn't bear it. I made him promise me that he wouldn't. I can't
tell you that. We talked for a long time and the night was full of doom.
He was tired then, but that wasn't all. He felt what was coming--the
Shadow .
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