ner and
looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment
for the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of the
first emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His
full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a
sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow
managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more
or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,
but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.

He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,
from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it
added--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--various
troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he
really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough
of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these
first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This
at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather
than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be
part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not
meanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanations
weren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always with
the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."
Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their
stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with
this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,
for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in
with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question
he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since,
when it came to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the
sense of union: its importance was less from