swer for what Mrs. Server had been
going to say. He took it gravely, but he took everything so gravely that
I saw no symptom in that. In fact, as he appeared at first careful not
to meet my eyes, I saw for a minute or two no symptom in anything--in
anything, at least, but the way in which, standing beside me and before
Mrs. Server's bench, he received the conscious glare of her recognition
without returning it and without indeed giving her a look. He looked all
about--looked, as she herself had done after our meeting, at the
charming place and its marks of the hour, at the rich twilight, deeper
now in the avenues, and at the tree-tops and sky, more flushed now with
colour. I found myself of a sudden quite as sorry for him as I had been
for Mrs. Server, and I scarce know how it was suggested to me that
during the short interval since our separation something had happened
that made a difference in him. Was the difference a consciousness still
more charged than I had left it? I couldn't exactly say, and the
question really lost itself in what soon came uppermost for me--the
desire, above all, to spare them both and to spare them equally.

The difficulty, however, was to spare them in some fashion that would
not be more marked than continuing to observe them. To leave them
together without a decent pretext would be marked; but this, I eagerly
recognised, was none the less what most concerned me. Whatever they
might see in it, there was by this time little enough doubt of how it
would indicate for my own mind that the wheel had completely turned.
That was the point to which I had been brought by the lapse of a few
hours. I had verily travelled far since the sight of the pair on the
terrace had given its arrest to my first talk with Mrs. Briss. I was
obliged to admit to myself that nothing could very well have been more
singular than some of my sequences. I had come round to the opposite
pole of the protest my companion had then drawn from me--which was the
pole of agreement with herself; and it hung sharply before me that I was
pledged to confess to her my revolution. I couldn't now be in the
presence of the two creatures I was in the very act of finally judging
to be not a whit less stricken than I had originally imagined them--I
couldn't do this and think with any complacency of the redemption of my
pledge; for the process by which I had at last definitely inculpated
Mrs. Server was precisely such a process of providential