wn, as they said in the cage, had
not waked up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to something than
in happier conditions she would have thought of romantically as Saint
Martin's summer. The counter-clerk had gone to his dinner; she herself
was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the midst of which she became
aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the shop a minute and
that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.

He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw him
and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh in
which she read a new consciousness. It was a confession of awkwardness;
it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought better to have kept
his head, ought to have been clever enough to wait, on some pretext, till
he should have found her free. Mr. Buckton was a long time with him, and
her attention was soon demanded by other visitors; so that nothing passed
between them but the fulness of their silence. The look she took from
him was his greeting, and the other one a simple sign of the eyes sent
her before going out. The only token they exchanged therefore was his
tacit assent to her wish that since they couldn't attempt a certain
frankness they should attempt nothing at all. This was her intense
preference; she could be as still and cold as any one when that was the
sole solution.

Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants struck
her as marking a step: they were built so--just in the mere flash--on the
recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she would do for
him. The "anything, anything" she had uttered in the Park went to and
fro between them and under the poked-out china that interposed. It had
all at last even put on the air of their not needing now clumsily to
manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal make-believes, the
intense implications of questions and answers and change, had become in
the light of the personal fact, of their having had their moment, a
possibility comparatively poor. It was as if they had met for all
time--it exerted on their being in presence again an influence so
prodigious. When she watched herself, in the memory of that night, walk
away from him as if she were making an end, she found something too
pitiful in the primness of such a gait. Hadn't she precisely established
on the part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?

It must be admitted