, the words poured from him. With
gesticulation that was faintly foreign, ever so little dramatic, he
unpacked his adventures. He spoke as though this were, beyond all time,
_the_ moment when he must make his effect.

He did it well, a born teller of tales. And yet Miss Rand wished that he
had not had to do it at all, that there had been more reserve, less
drama, less volubility.

Mrs. Rand, an older Desdemona, listened spellbound. This was as good as
getting a circulating library without paying a subscription. As she said
to her daughter afterwards: "He really was as good as those novels by
what's his name--you know who I mean--those delightful stories about
those foreign places--and the sea."

He spoke of the first time that he had actually been conscious of the
jungle. "Of course I'd been into it dozens of times--often and often.
But there was a day--I remember as though it were yesterday--when we
went up in a boat--some river or another--That river was the most secret
and sleepy green, and the place all closed about it as though we'd gone
into a box, and they'd closed the lid. Nothing but the green river and
all the forest getting closer and closer and darker and darker, all
blacker than you can imagine, and worse still when it was lighter--a
kind of twilight--and you could see enough to make you shiver--no sound
but the animals, and the branches and the great plants and brilliant
flowers all creeping and crawling--Suddenly--all in a flash--I wanted a
lamp-post and a public house, a wet night shining on streets, the
rattle of a hansom--I was suddenly ghastly frightened, and we got deeper
and deeper into it, and human beings further and further behind, and
only the beastly monkeys and the alligators and the hideous flowers. I
can feel it still----"

Rachel was enthralled. He called up, on every side about her, that stern
life of hers. He knew and she knew--they alone out of all the world. All
her gaiety, her happiness, her interest of the last weeks went now for
nothing beside this experience. He was not now related to the
Beaminsters--to Grandmother, to Aunt Adela, to Uncle John--but to _her_
and to that part of her that had nothing to do with the Beaminsters at
all. The room, the commonplace furniture, the pictures of "Lodore Falls"
and "The Fighting Temeraire," the little glimpses of the square beyond
the window, these things shared in the mystery.

Miss Rand had seen her caught and held. "_She's_ very young