tions strange
to me as I sat beside her. It had been something larger and finer,
something great and embracing, a return to fellowship. Here beside me,
veiled from me only by our transient embarrassment and the tarnish of
separation and silences, was the one person who had ever broken down the
crust of shy insincerity which is so incurably my characteristic and
talked intimately of the inmost things of life to me. I discovered now
for the first time how intense had been my loneliness for the past five
years. I discovered now that through all those years I had been hungry
for such talk as Mary alone could give me. My mind was filled with talk,
filled with things I desired to say to her; that chaos began to take on
a multitudinous expression at the touch of her spirit. I began to
imagine conversations with her, to prepare reports for her of those new
worlds of sensation and activity I had discovered since that boyish
parting.

But when at last that talk came it was altogether different from any of
those I had invented.

She wrote to me when she came down into Surrey and I walked over to
Martens the next afternoon. I found her in her own sitting-room, a
beautiful characteristic apartment with tall French windows hung with
blue curtains, a large writing-desk and a great litter of books. The
room gave upon a broad sunlit terrace with a balustrading of yellowish
stone, on which there stood great oleanders. Beyond was a flower garden
and then the dark shadows of cypresses. She was standing as I came in to
her, as though she had seen me coming across the lawns and had been
awaiting my entrance. "I thought you might come to-day," she said, and
told the manservant to deny her to other callers. Again she produced
that queer effect of being at once altogether the same and altogether
different from the Mary I had known. "Justin," she said, "is in Paris.
He comes back on Friday." I saw then that the change lay in her bearing,
that for the easy confidence of the girl she had now the deliberate
dignity and control of a married woman--a very splendidly and spaciously
married woman. Her manner had been purged of impulse. Since we had met
she had stood, the mistress of great houses, and had dealt with
thousands of people.

"You walked over to me?"

"I walked," I said. "It is nearly a straight path. You know it?"

"You came over the heather beyond our pine wood," she confirmed. And
then I think we talked some polite unrealities about