Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/36

 them all alive again after all those years, how you had forgotten the way they breathed and spoke and had their being; how interesting to find yourself drawn back again into that old current, perilous perhaps, but deep, real after all the shams"

He broke off. "Places do the same, I think," he said. "If you have the sort of things in you that stir them they produce in their turn their things ... and always will for your kind ... a sort of secret society; I believe," he added, suddenly turning on Harkness and looking him in the face, "that Treliss might give you something of the same adventure that it gave me—if you want it to, that is—if you need it. Do you want adventure, romance, something that will pull you right out of yourself and test you, show you whether you are real or no, give you a crisis that will change you for ever? Do you want it?"

Then he added quietly, reflectively. "It changed me more than the war ever did."

"Do I want it?" Harkness was breathing deeply, driven by some excitement that he could not stop to analyse. "I should say so. I want nothing so much. It's just what I need, what I've been looking for"

"Then go down there. I believe you're just the kind—but go at the right time. There's a night in August when they have a dance, when they dance