for her; but his inner
restlessness vented itself in an intense desire for bodily movement. He
would have liked to walk himself into a state of torpor; to tramp on
for hours through the moist winds and the healing darkness and come
back staggering with fatigue and sleep. But he had no pretext for such
a flight, and he feared that, at such a moment, his prolonged absence
might seem singular to Anna.

As he approached the house, the thought of her nearness produced a swift
reaction of mood. It was as if an intenser vision of her had scattered
his perplexities like morning mists. At this moment, wherever she was,
he knew he was safely shut away in her thoughts, and the knowledge made
every other fact dwindle away to a shadow. He and she loved each other,
and their love arched over them open and ample as the day: in all its
sunlit spaces there was no cranny for a fear to lurk. In a few minutes
he would be in her presence and would read his reassurance in her eyes.
And presently, before dinner, she would contrive that they should have
an hour by themselves in her sitting-room, and he would sit by the
hearth and watch her quiet movements, and the way the bluish lustre on
her hair purpled a little as she bent above the fire.

A carriage drove out of the court as he entered it, and in the hall his
vision was dispelled by the exceedingly substantial presence of a lady
in a waterproof and a tweed hat, who stood firmly planted in the centre
of a pile of luggage, as to which she was giving involved but lucid
directions to the footman who had just admitted her. She went on with
these directions regardless of Darrow's entrance, merely fixing her
small pale eyes on him while she proceeded, in a deep contralto voice,
and a fluent French pronounced with the purest Boston accent, to specify
the destination of her bags; and this enabled Darrow to give her back a
gaze protracted enough to take in all the details of her plain thick-set
person, from the square sallow face beneath bands of grey hair to the
blunt boot-toes protruding under her wide walking skirt.

She submitted to this scrutiny with no more evidence of surprise than
a monument examined by a tourist; but when the fate of her luggage had
been settled she turned suddenly to Darrow and, dropping her eyes from
his face to his feet, asked in trenchant accents: "What sort of boots
have you got on?"

Before he could summon his wits to the consideration of this question
she contin