ed
nerve that his own very attitude was supplying a connection; he knew
presently that he wouldn't have had her go, _couldn't_ have made a
sign to her for it--which was what she had been uncertain of--without
speaking to him; and that therefore he was, as at the other, the hideous
time, passive to whatever she might do. She was even yet, she was
always, in possession of him; she had known how and where to find him
and had appointed that he should see her, and, though he had never
dreamed it was again to happen to him, he was meeting it already as if
it might have been the only thing that the least humanly _could_.
Yes, he had come back there to flop, by long custom, upon the bench of
desolation _as_ the man in the whole place, precisely, to whom nothing
worth more than tuppence could happen; whereupon, in the grey desert of
his consciousness, the very earth had suddenly opened and flamed. With
this, further, it came over him that he hadn't been prepared and
that his wretched appearance must show it. He wasn't fit to receive
a visit--any visit; a flush for his felt misery, in the light of her
opulence, broke out in his lean cheeks. But if he coloured he sat as he
was--she should at least, as a visitor, be satisfied. His eyes only, at
last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at the sea. That,
however, didn't relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another
moment the odd desperate gesture of raising both his hands to his face
and letting them, while he pressed it to them, cover and guard it. It
was as he held them there that she at last spoke.

"I'll go away if you wish me to." And then she waited a moment. "I
mean now--now that you've seen I'm here. I wanted you to know it, and I
thought of writing--I was afraid of our meeting accidentally. Then I was
afraid that if I wrote you might refuse. So I thought of this way--as
I knew you must come out here." She went on with pauses, giving him a
chance to make a sign. "I've waited several days. But I'll do what you
wish. Only I should like in that case to come back." Again she stopped;
but strange was it to him that he wouldn't have made her break off. She
held him in boundless wonder. "I came down--I mean I came from town--on
purpose. I'm staying on still, and I've a great patience and will give
you time. Only may I say it's important? Now that I do see you," she
brought out in the same way, "I see how inevitable it was--I mean that I
should have wanted to