rt, a quickening of the senses,
seemed to give him a new consciousness of life. His mood of five
minutes ago had completely vanished. He remembered his dreary ramble
about the lanes as if it had taken place last week. Miss Derwent was
still speaking to him; his mind echoed again and again every word she
had said, perfectly reproducing her voice, her intonation; he saw her
bright, beautiful face, its changing lights, its infinite subtleties of
expression. The arch of her eyebrows and the lovely hazel eyes beneath;
the small and exquisitely shaped mouth; the little chin, so delicately
round and firm; all were engraved on his memory, once and for ever.

He sat down and was lost in a dream. His arms hung idly; all his
muscles were relaxed. His eyes dwelt on a point of the carpet which he
did not see.

Then, with a sudden start of activity, he went to the looking-glass and
surveyed himself. His tie was the worse for wear. He exchanged it for
another. He brushed his hair violently, and smoothed his moustache.
Never had he felt such dissatisfaction with his appearance. Never had
it struck him so disagreeably before that he was hard-featured, sallow,
anything but a handsome man. Yet, he had good teeth, very white and
regular; that was something, perhaps. Observing them, he grinned at
himself grotesquely--and at once was so disgusted that he turned with a
shudder away.

Ordinarily, he would have awaited the summons of the bell for tea. But,
after making himself ready, he gazed from the window and saw Miss
Derwent walking alone in the garden; he hastened down.

She gave him a look of intelligence, but took his arrival as a matter
of course, and spoke to him about a flowering shrub which pleased her.
Otway's heart sank. What had he expected? He neither knew nor asked
himself; he stood beside her, seeing nothing, hearing only a voice and
wishing it would speak on for ever. He was no longer a reflecting,
reasoning young man, with a tolerably firm will and fixed purposes, but
a mere embodied emotion, and that of the vaguest, swaying in dependence
on another's personality.

Olga Hannaford joined them. Olga, for all the various charms of her
face, had never thus affected him. But then, he had known her a few
years ago, when, as something between child and woman, she had little
power to interest an imaginative boy, whose ideal was some actress seen
only in a photograph, or some great lady on her travels glimpsed as he
strayed abou