Professor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was just back from a visit to America. One afternoon, soon after his return, he put on his frock-coat and drove in a hansom to pay a call upon Hilda Burgoyne, who still lived at her old number, off Bedford Square. He and Miss Burgoyne had been fast friends for a long time. He had first noticed her about the corridors of the British Museum, where he read constantly. Her being there so often had made him feel that he would like to know her, and as she was not an inaccessible person, an introduction was not difficult. The preliminaries once over, they came to depend a great deal upon each other, and Wilson, after his day’s reading, often went round to Bedford Square for his tea. They had much more in common than their memories of a common friend. Indeed, they seldom spoke of him. They saved that for the deep moments which do not come often, and then their talk of him was mostly silence. Wilson knew that Hilda had loved him; more than this he had not tried to know.
It was late when Wilson reached Hilda’s apartment on this particular December afternoon, and he found her alone. She sent for fresh tea and made him comfortable, as she had such a knack of making people comfortable.
“How good you were to come back before Christmas! I quite dreaded the Holidays without you. You’ve helped me over a good many Christmases.” She smiled at him gayly.
“As if you needed me for that! But, at any rate, I needed YOU. How well you are looking, my dear, and how rested.”
He peered up at her from his low chair, balancing the tips of his long fingers together in a judicial manner which had grown on him with years.
Hilda laughed as she carefully poured his cream. “That means that I was looking very seedy at the end of the season, doesn’t it? Well, we must show wear at last, you know.”
Wilson took the cup gratefully. “Ah, no need to remind a man of seventy, who has just been home to find that he has survived all his contemporaries. I was most gently treated — as a sort of precious relic. But, do you know, it made me feel awkward to be hanging about still.”
“Seventy? Never mention it to me.” Hilda looked appreciatively at the Professor’s alert face, with so many kindly lines about the mouth and so many quizzical ones about the eyes. “You’ve got to hang about for me, you know. I can’t even let you go home again. You must stay put, now that I have you back. You’re the realest thing I have.”
Wilson chuckled. “Dear me, am I? Out of so many conquests and the spoils of conquered cities! You’ve really missed me? Well, then, I shall hang. Even if you have at last to put ME in the mummy-room with the others. You’ll visit me often, won’t you?”
“Every day in the calendar. Here, your cigarettes are in this drawer, where you left them.” She struck a match and lit one for him. “But you did, after all, enjoy being at home again?”
“Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live a thousand miles apart. But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the place. It was in Boston I lingered longest.”
“Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?”
“Often. I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times, I should think. Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I found that I still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if Bartley were there, somehow, and that at any moment one might hear his heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be up in his study.” The Professor looked reflectively into the grate. “I should really have liked to go up t............