e influence,
in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this
consecrated nook, which was so much of the type of all the bemused and
remembered. We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful
old tale, and it wouldn't be the fault of Newmarch if some other green
_carrefour_, not far off, didn't balance with this one and offer the
alternative of niches, in the greenness, occupied by weather-stained
statues on florid pedestals.

I sat straight down on the nearest of our benches, for this struck me as
the best way to express the conception with which the sight of Mrs.
Server filled me. It showed her that if I watched her I also waited for
her, and that I was therefore not affected in any manner she really need
deprecate. She had been too far off for me to distinguish her face, but
her approach had faltered long enough to let me see that if she had not
taken it as too late she would, to escape me, have found some pretext
for turning off. It was just my seating myself that made the
difference--it was my being so simple with her that brought her on. She
came slowly and a little wearily down the vista, and her sad, shy
advance, with the massed wood on either side of her, was like the
reminiscence of a picture or the refrain of a ballad. What made the
difference with _me_--if any difference had remained to be made--was the
sense of this sharp cessation of her public extravagance. She had folded
up her manner in her flounced parasol, which she seemed to drag after
her as a sorry soldier his musket. It was present to me without a pang
that this was the person I had sent poor Briss off to find--the person
poor Briss would owe me so few thanks for his failure to have found. It
was equally marked to me that, however detached and casual she might, at
the first sight of me, have wished to show herself, it was to alight on
poor Briss that she had come out, it was because he had not been at the
house and might therefore, on his side, be wandering, that she had taken
care to be unaccompanied. My demonstration was complete from the moment
I thus had them in the act of seeking each other, and I was so pleased
at having gathered them in that I cared little what else they had
missed. I neither moved nor spoke till she had come quite near me, and
as she also gave no sound the meaning of our silence seemed to stare
straight out. It absolutely phrased there, in all the wonderful
conditions, a relation already e