Professor Moorsom, slight frame of middle height, a thoughtful keen head under the thick wavy hair, veiled dark eyes under straight eyebrows, and with an inward gaze which when disengaged and arriving at one seemed to issue from an obscure dream of books, from the limbo of meditation, showed himself extremely gracious to him.Renouard guessed in him a man whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to the events of existence.Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly.
They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view of the town and the harbour.
The splendid immobility of the bay resting under his gaze, with its grey spurs and shining indentations, helped Renouard to regain his self-possession, which he had felt shaken, in coming out on the terrace, into the setting of the most powerful emotion of his life, when he had sat within a foot of Miss Moorsom with fire in his breast, a humming in his ears, and in a complete disorder of his mind.There was the very garden seat on which he had been enveloped in the radiant spell.And presently he was sitting on it again with the professor talking of her.Near by the patriarchal Dunster leaned forward in a wicker arm-chair, benign and a little deaf, his big hand to his ear with the innocent eagerness of his advanced age remembering the fires of life.
It was with a sort of apprehension that Renouard looked forward to seeing Miss Moorsom.And strangely enough it resembled the state of mind of a man who fears disenchantment more than sortilege.But he need not have been afraid.Directly he saw her in a distance at the other end of the terrace he shuddered to the roots of his hair.
With her approach the power of speech left him for a time.Mrs.
Dunster and her aunt were accompanying her.All these people sat down; it was an intimate circle into which Renouard felt himself cordially admitted; and the talk was of the great search which occupied all their minds.Discretion was expected by these people, but of reticence as to the object of the journey there could be no question.Nothing but ways and means and arrangements could be talked about.
By fixing his eyes obstinately on the ground, which gave him an air of reflective sadness, Renouard managed to recover his self-possession.He used it to keep his voice in a low key and to measure his words on the great subject.And he took care with a great inward effort to make them reasonable without giving them a discouraging complexion.For he did not want the quest to be given up, since it would mean her going away with her two attendant grey-heads to the other side of the world.
He was asked to come again, to come often and take part in the counsels of all these people captivated by the sentimental enterprise of a declared love.On taking Miss Moorsom's hand he looked up, would have liked to say something, but found himself voiceless, with his lips suddenly sealed.She returned the pressure of his fingers, and he left her with her eyes vaguely staring beyond him, an air of listening for an expected sound, and the faintest possible smile on her lips.A smile not for him, evidently, but the reflection of some deep and inscrutable thought.
