f what was seemly;
he was on the whole both repelled and fascinated by the incidents of
this visit of his. Yet as he walked leisurely homewards through the
bright, crowded streets, he recognized the existence of that strange
personal charm in Berenice of which so many people had written and
spoken. He himself had become subject to it in some slight degree, not
enough, indeed, to engross his mind, yet enough to prevent any
feeling of disappointment at the result of his visit.

She was not an ordinary woman--she was not an ordinarily clever woman.
She did not belong to any type with which he was acquainted. She must
for ever occupy a place of her own in his thoughts and in his
estimation. It was a place very well defined, he told himself, and by
no means within that inner circle of his brain and heart wherein lay
the few things in life sweet and precious to him. The vague excitement
of the early morning seemed to him now, as he moved calmly along the
crowded, fashionable thoroughfare, a thing altogether unreal and
unnatural. He had been in an emotional frame of mind, he told himself
with a quiet smile, when the sight of those few lines in a handwriting
then unknown had so curiously stirred him. Now that he had seen
and spoken to her, her personality would recede to its proper
proportions, the old philosophic calm which hung around him in his
studious life like a mantle would have no further disturbance.

And then he suffered a rude shock! As he passed the corner of a
street, the perfume of Neapolitan violets came floating out from a
florist's shop upon the warm sunlit air. Every fibre of his being
quivered with a sudden emotion! The interior of that little room was
before him, and a woman's eyes looked into his. He clenched his hands
and walked swiftly on, with pale face and rigid lips, like a man
oppressed by some acute physical pain.

There must be nothing of this for him! It was part of a world which
was not his world--of which he must never even be a temporary denizen.
The thing passed away! With studious care he fixed his mind upon
trifles. There was a crease in his silk hat, clearly visible as he
glanced at his reflection in a plate-glass window. He turned into
Scott's, and waited whilst it was ironed. Then he walked homewards and
spent the remainder of the day carefully revising a bundle of proofs
which he found on his table fresh from the printer.

On the following morning he lunched at his club. Somehow, alth