e I like to be kind!" she said with the best faith in the
world; to which I could only return, as we entered the train, that it
was a kindness Lady John would doubtless appreciate. Long rejoined us,
and we ran, as I have said, our course; which, as I have also noted,
seemed short to me in the light of such a blaze of suggestion. To each
of my companions--and the fact stuck out of them--something
unprecedented had happened.

II

The day was as fine and the scene as fair at Newmarch as the party was
numerous and various; and my memory associates with the rest of the long
afternoon many renewals of acquaintance and much sitting and strolling,
for snatches of talk, in the long shade of great trees and through the
straight walks of old gardens. A couple of hours thus passed, and fresh
accessions enriched the picture. There were persons I was curious of--of
Lady John, for instance, of whom I promised myself an early view; but we
were apt to be carried away in currents that reflected new images and
sufficiently beguiled impatience. I recover, all the same, a full
sequence of impressions, each of which, I afterwards saw, had been
appointed to help all the others. If my anecdote, as I have mentioned,
had begun, at Paddington, at a particular moment, it gathered substance
step by step and without missing a link. The links, in fact, should I
count them all, would make too long a chain. They formed, nevertheless,
the happiest little chapter of accidents, though a series of which I can
scarce give more than the general effect.

One of the first accidents was that, before dinner, I met Ford Obert
wandering a little apart with Mrs. Server, and that, as they were known
to me as agreeable acquaintances, I should have faced them with
confidence had I not immediately drawn from their sequestered air the
fear of interrupting them. Mrs. Server was always lovely and Obert
always expert; the latter straightway pulled up, however, making me as
welcome as if their converse had dropped. She was extraordinarily
pretty, markedly responsive, conspicuously charming, but he gave me a
look that really seemed to say: "Don't--there's a good fellow--leave me
any longer alone with her!" I had met her at Newmarch before--it was
indeed only so that I had met her--and I knew how she was valued there.
I also knew that an aversion to pretty women--numbers of whom he had
preserved for a grateful posterity--was his sign neither as man nor as
artist; t