rather than that he had seen her in the flesh outside in the
street. And yet he had not been thinking of her at all. The impression
was so intense that he could not dismiss it, nor even think whether
he had seen her or merely imagined her. He sat down at once, and said,
briefly and strangely, rather to himself than to Mary:

"That was Katharine Hilbery."

"Katharine Hilbery? What do you mean?" she asked, hardly understanding
from his manner whether he had seen her or not.

"Katharine Hilbery," he repeated. "But she's gone now."

"Katharine Hilbery!" Mary thought, in an instant of blinding revelation;
"I've always known it was Katharine Hilbery!" She knew it all now.

After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked steadily
at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze leveled at a point far
beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never reached in all
the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips just parted, the
fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt contemplation,
which fell like a veil between them. She noticed everything about him;
if there had been other signs of his utter alienation she would have
sought them out, too, for she felt that it was only by heaping one truth
upon another that she could keep herself sitting there, upright. The
truth seemed to support her; it struck her, even as she looked at his
face, that the light of truth was shining far away beyond him; the light
of truth, she seemed to frame the words as she rose to go, shines on a
world not to be shaken by our personal calamities.

Ralph handed her her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the
coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still twisted
about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might make to
sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from the ivy
and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick of the
rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled her fur cap
closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a long and stormy
walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she took a slip of paper
from her purse, and read out loud a list of commissions entrusted to
her--fruit, butter, string, and so on; and all the time she never spoke
directly to Ralph or looked at him.

Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-checked men in white
aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon th