"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."
"Just where it ought to--just where he would have been and where I should have seen him had he been like other people."
I had listened with the deepest interest, but it was my duty to think of objections. "How long a time elapsed between the moment you perceived his absence and the moment you called?"
"Oh, only an instant. I don't pretend it was long."
"Long enough for you to be sure?" I said.
"Yes, and that you were not mistaken, not the victim of some hocus-pocus of your eyesight."
"I may have been mistaken, but I don't believe it. At any rate, that's just why I want you to look in his room."
I thought a moment. "How _can_ I, when even his wife doesn't dare to?"
"She _wants_ to; propose it to her. It wouldn't take much to make her. She does suspect."
I thought another moment. "Did he seem to know?"
"That I had missed him? So it struck me, but he thought he had been quick enough."
"Heaven forbid! It seemed to me too strange."
Trying to think it out again and reconstitute her miracle, Blanche Adney gazed abstractedly up the valley. Suddenly she exclaimed: "Just as he looks now!" and I saw Lord Mellifont stand before us with his sketch-block. I perceived, as we met him, that he looked neither suspicious nor blank: he looked simply, as he did always, everywhere, the principal feature of the scene. Naturally he had no sketch to show us, but nothing could better have rounded off our actual conception of him than the way he fell into position as we approached. He had been selecting his point of view; he took possession of it with a flourish of the pencil. He leaned against a rock; his beautiful little box of water-colours reposed on a natural table beside him, a ledge of the bank which showed how inveterately nature ministered to his convenience. He painted while he talked and he talked while he painted; and if the painting was as miscellaneous as the talk, the talk would equally have graced an album. We waited while the exhibition went on, and it seemed indeed as if the conscious profiles of the peaks were interested in his success. They grew as black as silhouettes in paper, sharp against a livid sky from which, however, there would be nothing to fear till Lord Mellifont's sketch should be finished. Blanche Adney communed with me dumbly, and I could read the language of her eyes: "Oh, if _we_ could only do it as well as that! He fills the stage in a way that beats us." We could no more have left him than we could have quitted the theatre till the play was over; but in due time we turned round with him and strolled back to the inn, before the door of which his lordship, glancing again at his picture, tore the fresh leaf from the block and presented it with a few happy words to Mrs. Adney. Then he went into the house; and a moment later, looking up from where we stood, we saw him, above, at the window of his sitting-room (he had the best apartments), watching the signs of the weather.