t the round of the
monument, and she remarked only that when he thought himself unnoticed
his face grew grave and his answers came less promptly.

On the way back, two or three miles from Givre, she suddenly proposed
that they should walk home through the forest which skirted that side of
the park. Darrow acquiesced, and they got out and sent Effie on in the
motor. Their way led through a bit of sober French woodland, flat as a
faded tapestry, but with gleams of live emerald lingering here and there
among its browns and ochres. The luminous grey air gave vividness to its
dying colours, and veiled the distant glimpses of the landscape in soft
uncertainty. In such a solitude Anna had fancied it would be easier to
speak; but as she walked beside Darrow over the deep soundless flooring
of brown moss the words on her lips took flight again. It seemed
impossible to break the spell of quiet joy which his presence laid on
her, and when he began to talk of the place they had just visited she
answered his questions and then waited for what he should say next...No,
decidedly she could not speak; she no longer even knew what she had
meant to say...

The same experience repeated itself several times that day and the
next. When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted herself in appeal and
interrogation, she formulated with a fervent lucidity every point in
her imaginary argument. But as soon as she was alone with him something
deeper than reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch
upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim disquietude,
through which his looks, his words, his touch, reached her as through
a mist of bodily pain. Yet this inertia was torn by wild flashes of
resistance, and when they were apart she began to prepare again what she
meant to say to him.

She knew he could not be with her without being aware of this inner
turmoil, and she hoped he would break the spell by some releasing word.
But she presently understood that he recognized the futility of words,
and was resolutely bent on holding her to her own purpose of behaving
as if nothing had happened. Once more she inwardly accused him of
insensibility, and her imagination was beset by tormenting visions of
his past...Had such things happened to him before? If the episode had
been an isolated accident--"a moment of folly and madness", as he had
called it--she could understand, or at least begin to understand (for
at a certain point her imag