ed
at her with a questioning smile. "Come! Tell me. You and I don't have
to say things to talk to each other. When you turn suddenly absentminded
and mysterious I always feel like saying: 'Come back. All is
discovered'."

She returned his smile. "You know as much as I know. I promise you
that."

He wavered, as if for the first time uncertain how far he might go. "I
don't know Darrow as much as you know him," he presently risked.

She frowned a little. "You said just now we didn't need to say things"

"Was I speaking? I thought it was your eyes----" He caught her by both
elbows and spun her halfway round, so that the late sun shed a betraying
gleam on her face. "They're such awfully conversational eyes! Don't you
suppose they told me long ago why it's just today you've made up your
mind that people have got to live their own lives--even at Givre?"

XI

"This is the south terrace," Anna said. "Should you like to walk down to
the river?"

She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far-off airy height, and
yet to be wholly gathered into the circle of consciousness which drew
its glowing ring about herself and Darrow. To the aerial listener her
words sounded flat and colourless, but to the self within the ring each
one beat with a separate heart.

It was the day after Darrow's arrival, and he had come down early, drawn
by the sweetness of the light on the lawns and gardens below his window.
Anna had heard the echo of his step on the stairs, his pause in the
stone-flagged hall, his voice as he asked a servant where to find her.
She was at the end of the house, in the brown-panelled sitting-room
which she frequented at that season because it caught the sunlight first
and kept it longest. She stood near the window, in the pale band of
brightness, arranging some salmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelain
bowl. Every sensation of touch and sight was thrice-alive in her. The
grey-green fur of the geranium leaves caressed her fingers and the
sunlight wavering across the irregular surface of the old parquet floor
made it seem as bright and shifting as the brown bed of a stream.

Darrow stood framed in the door-way of the farthest drawing-room, a
light-grey figure against the black and white flagging of the hall; then
he began to move toward her down the empty pale-panelled vista, crossing
one after another the long reflections which a projecting cabinet or
screen cast here and there upon the shining floors.