ned met his eyes as a composed picture--a
picture of which the subject was inveterately Julia and her ponies:
Julia wonderfully fair and fine, waving her whip, cleaving the crowd,
holding her head as if it had been a banner, smiling up into
second-storey windows, carrying him beside her, carrying him to his
doom. He had not reckoned at the time, in the few days, how much he had
driven about with her; but the image of it was there, in his consulted
conscience, as well as in a personal glow not yet chilled: it looked
large as it rose before him. The things his mother had said to him made
a rich enough frame for it all, and the whole impression had that night
kept him much awake.

XV

While, after leaving Mrs. Gresham, he was hesitating which way to go and
was on the point of hailing a gardener to ask if Mrs. Dallow had been
seen, he noticed, as a spot of colour in an expanse of shrubbery, a
far-away parasol moving in the direction of the lake. He took his course
toward it across the park, and as the bearer of the parasol strolled
slowly it was not five minutes before he had joined her. He went to her
soundlessly, on the grass--he had been whistling at first, but as he got
nearer stopped--and it was not till he was at hand that she looked
round. He had watched her go as if she were turning things over in her
mind, while she brushed the smooth walks and the clean turf with her
dress, slowly made her parasol revolve on her shoulder and carried in
the other hand a book which he perceived to be a monthly review.

"I came out to get away," she said when he had begun to walk with her.

"Away from me?"

"Ah that's impossible." Then she added: "The day's so very nice."

"Lovely weather," Nick dropped. "You want to get away from Mrs. Gresham,
I suppose."

She had a pause. "From everything!"

"Well, I want to get away too."

"It has been such a racket. Listen to the dear birds."

"Yes, our noise isn't so good as theirs," said Nick. "I feel as if I had
been married and had shoes and rice thrown after me," he went on. "But
not to you, Julia--nothing so good as that."

Julia made no reply; she only turned her eyes on the ornamental water
stretching away at their right. In a moment she exclaimed, "How nasty
the lake looks!" and Nick recognised in her tone a sign of that odd
shyness--a perverse stiffness at a moment when she probably but wanted
to be soft--which, taken in combination with her other qualities, was so