knew too much
and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms caused so much
poetry and history to press upon him that he needed some straying apart
to feel in a proper relation with them, though this impulse was not, as
happened, like the gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to
the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly
enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated.

It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer
meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a
remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun
merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It affected him as the sequel
of something of which he had lost the beginning. He knew it, and for the
time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn't know what it
continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was
also somehow aware--yet without a direct sign from her--that the young
woman herself hadn't lost the thread. She hadn't lost it, but she
wouldn't give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his
hand for it; and he not only saw that, but saw several things more,
things odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment some
accident of grouping brought them face to face he was still merely
fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past would
have had no importance. If it had had no importance he scarcely knew why
his actual impression of her should so seem to have so much; the answer
to which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be
leading for the moment one could but take things as they came. He was
satisfied, without in the least being able to say why, that this young
lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor relation; satisfied
also that she was not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a part
of the establishment--almost a working, a remunerated part. Didn't she
enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among other
services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome
people, answer questions about the dates of the building, the styles of
the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of
the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given her
shillings--it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she finally
drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so