"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebastian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
"But you can't believe things because they are a lovely idea."
"But I do. that's how I believe."
For a few happy hours of rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew up too fast.
"I was determined to have a happy Christmas."
"Did you?"
"I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't it?"
But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
"They can't hurt us, can they?"
"Not to-night; not now."
"Not for how many nights?"
"If I was rex..." his mind seemed full of such suppositions: "If I was archbishop of Westminster," If I was head of the Great Western Railway," If I was an actress"-- as though it were a mere trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any morning to find the matter adjusted.
He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.
"I don't want to make it easier for you," I said; "I hope your heart may break; but I do understand."
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