D,

_Sunday._

_Dear Mrs. Ross,_

_Please don't bother any more about it. I ought to have known
better. I don't think it was such a very crucial occasion. The
weather is frightfully hot, and I don't feel much like playing
footer this term. I'm reading Dante, not in Italian, of course.
London is as near the Inferno as anything, I should think. It's
horribly hot. Excuse this short letter, but I've nothing to say._

_Yours affectionately,_

_Michael._

Mrs. Ross made one more brief attempt to recapture him, but Michael put
her off with the most superficial gossip of school-life, and she did not
try again. He meant to play football, notwithstanding the hot weather,
but finding that his boots were worn out, he continually put off buying
another pair and let himself drift into October before he began. Then
he hurt his leg, and had to stop for a while. This spoiled his faint
chance for the First Fifteen, and in the end he gave up football
altogether without much regret.

Games were a great impediment after all, when October's thin blue skies
and sheen of pearl-soft airs led him on to dream along the autumnal
streets. Sometimes he would wander by himself through the groves of Hyde
Park and Kensington Gardens, or on some secluded green chair he would
sit reading Verlaine, while continuously about him the slow leaves of
the great planes swooped and fluttered down ambiguously like silent
birds.

One Saturday afternoon he was sitting thus, when through the silver fog
that on every side wrought the ultimate dissolution of the view Michael
saw the slim figure of a girl walking among the trees. His mind was gay
with Verlaine's delicate and fantastic songs, and this slim girl, as she
moved wraith-like over the ground marbled with fallen leaves, seemed to
express the cadence of the verse which had been sighing across the
printed page.

The girl with downcast glance walked on, seeming to follow her path
softly as one might follow through embroidery a thread of silk, and as
she drew nearer to Michael out of the fog's enchantment she lost none of
her indefinite charm; but she seemed still exquisite and silver-dewed.
There was no one else in sight, and now already Michael could hear the
lisping of her steps; then a breath of air among the tree-tops more
remote sent floating, swaying, fluttering about her a flight of leaves.
She paused, startled by the sudden shower, and at that m