that she saw him
galloping splendidly by.

At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing
up with tears. She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.

Presently he stopped short in his walk--stopped talking, with a gasp,
in the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face. She couldn't see
his clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long
breath. Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a
mortal endless minute, there was a silence.

At last she found something--it didn't matter much what--to say, and the
conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had
been for the first ten minutes after he had come in. But, paradoxically,
this superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the
thing that underlay it. Something had happened during that moment while
he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous,
critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for.

And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he
stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would
have convinced her, had she needed convincing.

The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that
was his as well as hers, for breathing-space--for time for the recovery
of lost bearings. Had he not felt it as well as she--she smiled a little
over this--he wouldn't have yielded. The man on horseback would have
taken an obstacle like that without breaking the stride of his gallop.

What underlay her quiet meaningless chat, was wonder and fear, and more
deeply still, a sort of cosmic contentment--the acquiescence of a
swimmer in the still irresistible current of a mighty river.

It was distinctly a relief to her when her mother came in and,
presently, Portia. She introduced him to them, and then dropped out of
the conversation altogether. As if it were a long way off, she heard him
retailing last night's adventure and expressing his regret that he
hadn't taken her to Frederica (that was his sister, Mrs. Whitney) to be
dried out, before he sent her home.

She was aware that Portia stole a look at her in a puzzled penetrating
sort of way every now and then, but didn't concern herself as to the
basis of her curiosity. She knew that it was getting on toward their
dinner-time, but didn't disturb herself as to the effect Inga's
premonitory rattlings out in the dining-room might hav