hem. After all, she was free and he was not.
Perhaps, in view of his situation, she had only increased the distance
between them by her unconventional request for a meeting.

She sat in the little drawing-room, and the cast-bronze clock ticked out
the minutes. She would not look out of the window: it might bring bad
luck to watch for him. And it seemed to her that a thousand invisible
spirits, hidden demons of good and evil, pressed about her, spying out
her thoughts, counting her heart-beats, ready to pounce upon the least
symptom of over-confidence and turn it deftly to derision. Oh, for an
altar on which to pour out propitiatory offerings! But what sweeter
could they have than her smothered heart-beats, her choked-back tears?

The bell rang, and she stood up as if a spring had jerked her to her
feet. In the mirror between the dried grasses her face looked long pale
inanimate. Ah, if he should find her too changed--! If there were but
time to dash upstairs and put on a touch of red....

The door opened; it shut on him; he was there.

He said: "You wanted to see me?"

She answered: "Yes." And her heart seemed to stop beating.

At first she could not make out what mysterious change had come over
him, and why it was that in looking at him she seemed to be looking at a
stranger; then she perceived that his voice sounded as it used to sound
when he was talking to other people; and she said to herself, with a
sick shiver of understanding, that she had become an "other person" to
him.

There was a deathly pause; then she faltered out, not knowing what she
said: "Nick--you'll sit down?"

He said: "Thanks," but did not seem to have heard her, for he continued
to stand motionless, half the room between them. And slowly the
uselessness, the hopelessness of his being there overcame her. A wall of
granite seemed to have built itself up between them. She felt as if
it hid her from him, as if with those remote new eyes of his he were
staring into the wall and not at her. Suddenly she said to herself:
"He's suffering more than I am, because he pities me, and is afraid to
tell me that he is going to be married."

The thought stung her pride, and she lifted her head and met his eyes
with a smile.

"Don't you think," she said, "it's more sensible-with everything so
changed in our lives--that we should meet as friends, in this way? I
wanted to tell you that you needn't feel--feel in the least unhappy
about me."

A deep flus