bed among the
round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the calves fitted
in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits, which were
sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped so; she
thought that it was only in his mind that he was different. She did not
wish him to be too different from other people. The walk had given him
a ruddy color, too, and his eyes were lit up by a steady, honest light,
which could not make the simplest farmer feel ill at ease, or suggest
to the most devout of clergymen a disposition to sneer at his faith. She
loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and compared it to the brow of a
young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it
half falls on its haunches. He always seemed to her like a rider on a
spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being with him,
because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the right
pace among other people. Sitting opposite him at the little table in
the window, she came back to that state of careless exaltation which had
overcome her when they halted by the gate, but now it was accompanied by
a sense of sanity and security, for she felt that they had a feeling
in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How silent he
was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and again looking
steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the next table,
with so little self-consciousness that she could almost watch his mind
placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she thought that
she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her fingers, and
she could anticipate the exact moment when he would put an end to his
thought and turn a little in his chair and say:

"Well, Mary--?" inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he
had dropped it.

And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:

"Well, Mary?" with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in
him.

She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by
the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car
with an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady's maid on the seat
opposite, holding a King Charles's spaniel; there was a country-woman
wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;
there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle market
with a dissenting minister--so she defined them.

She ran over this list wit