out of the swinging doors of
hotels.

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other
faces. He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to
the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel
that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary,
the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face
that was so many more things at once, and things so different. It was
that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or
worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different. Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.

He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him. At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.

"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.

The doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on