last," she said, still unsmiling. "I
saw about you in the papers.... You had a good time."

"I had great good luck," I replied.

"I never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a
soldier."

I think I said that luck made soldiers.

Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began
a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my
part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making
soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to
convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural
insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our
minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs
who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The
impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of
impossible utterances. It was with a real quality of rescue that our
hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table,
and to introduce me to mine. "You shall have him again on your other
side," she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me
as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider I was.

We talked very little at dinner. Both of us I think were quite unequal
to the occasion. Whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of
us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting
hour side by side. I began to remember old happenings with an
astonishing vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand I had
kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed
off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. Was she too
remembering? But I perhaps had changed altogether....

"Why did you go away as you did?" she asked abruptly, when for a moment
we were isolated conversationally. "Why did you never write?"

She had still that phantom lisp.

"What else could I do?"

She turned away from me and answered the man on her left, who had just
addressed her....

When the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent
things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent of
unspoken intimacies. We discussed something; I think Lady Tarvrille's
flowers and the Cape Flora and gardens. She told me she had a Japanese
garden with three Japanese gardeners. They were wonderful little men to
watch. "Humming-bird gardeners," she called t