stablished; but the strange and
beautiful thing was that as soon as we had recognised and accepted it
this relation put us almost at our ease. "You must be weary of walking,"
I said at last, "and you see I've been keeping a seat for you."

I had finally got up, as a sign of welcome, but I had directly
afterwards resumed my position, and it was an illustration of the terms
on which we met that we neither of us seemed to mind her being meanwhile
on her feet. She stood before me as if to take in--with her smile that
had by this time sunk quite to dimness--more than we should, either of
us, after all, be likely to be able to say. I even saw from this moment,
I think, that, whatever she might understand, she would be able herself
to say but little. She gave herself, in that minute, more than she
doubtless knew--gave herself, I mean, to my intenser apprehension. She
went through the form of expression, but what told me everything was the
way the form of expression broke down. Her lovely grimace, the light of
the previous hours, was as blurred as a bit of brushwork in water-colour
spoiled by the upsetting of the artist's glass. She fixed me with it as
she had fixed during the day forty persons, but it fluttered like a bird
with a broken wing. She looked about and above, down each of our dusky
avenues and up at our gilded tree-tops and our painted sky, where, at
the moment, the passage of a flight of rooks made a clamour. She
appeared to wish to produce some explanation of her solitude, but I was
quickly enough sure that she would never find a presentable one. I only
wanted to show her how little I required it. "I like a lonely walk," I
went on, "at the end of a day full of people: it's always, to me, on
such occasions, quite as if something has happened that the mind wants
to catch and fix before the vividness fades. So I mope by myself an
hour--I take stock of my impressions. But there's one thing I don't
believe you know. This is the very first time, in such a place and at
such an hour, that it has ever befallen me to come across a friend
stricken with the same perversity and engaged in the same pursuit. Most
people, don't you see?"--I kept it up as I could--"don't in the least
know what has happened to them, and don't care to know. That's one way,
and I don't deny it may be practically the best. But if one does care to
know, that's another way. As soon as I saw you there at the end of the
alley I said to myself, with quite a