Page:The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/69

Rh "You must take me there," I said.

"We may see the wonder here. The place was simply one that offered no chance for concealment—a great gradual hill-side, without obstructions or trees. There were some rocks below me, behind which I myself had disappeared, but from which, on coming back, I immediately emerged again."

"Then he must have seen you."

"He was too utterly gone, for some reason best known to himself. It was probably some moment of fatigue—he's getting on, you know, so that, with the sense of returning solitude, the reaction had been proportionately great, the extinction proportionately complete. At any rate, the stage was as bare as your hand."

"Could he have been somewhere else?"

"He couldn't have been, in the time, anywhere but where I had left him. Yet the place was utterly empty—as empty as this stretch of valley before us. He had vanished—he had ceased to be. But as soon as my voice rang out (I uttered his name), he rose before me like the rising sun."

"And where did the sun rise?"