way of answer in such sudden headlong embarrassment, as she was quite
aware, that while she remained silent he showed himself checked by her
expression. "You _have_--haven't you?--taken a particular interest?"

"Oh a particular interest!" she quavered out, feeling the whole thing--her
headlong embarrassment--get terribly the better of her, and wishing, with
a sudden scare, all the more to keep her emotion down. She maintained
her fixed smile a moment and turned her eyes over the peopled darkness,
unconfused now, because there was something much more confusing. This,
with a fatal great rush, was simply the fact that they were thus
together. They were near, near, and all she had imagined of that had
only become more true, more dreadful and overwhelming. She stared
straight away in silence till she felt she looked an idiot; then, to say
something, to say nothing, she attempted a sound which ended in a flood
of tears.

CHAPTER XVI

Her tears helped her really to dissimulate, for she had instantly, in so
public a situation, to recover herself. They had come and gone in half a
minute, and she immediately explained them. "It's only because I'm
tired. It's that--it's that!" Then she added a trifle incoherently: "I
shall never see you again."

"Ah but why not?" The mere tone in which her companion asked this
satisfied her once for all as to the amount of imagination for which she
could count on him. It was naturally not large: it had exhausted itself
in having arrived at what he had already touched upon--the sense of an
intention in her poor zeal at Cocker's. But any deficiency of this kind
was no fault in him: he wasn't obliged to have an inferior cleverness--to
have second-rate resources and virtues. It had been as if he almost
really believed she had simply cried for fatigue, and he accordingly put
in some kind confused plea--"You ought really to take something: won't
you have something or other _somewhere_?" to which she had made no
response but a headshake of a sharpness that settled it. "Why shan't we
all the more keep meeting?"

"I mean meeting this way--only this way. At my place there--_that_ I've
nothing to do with, and I hope of course you'll turn up, with your
correspondence, when it suits you. Whether I stay or not, I mean; for I
shall probably not stay."

"You're going somewhere else?" he put it with positive anxiety.

"Yes, ever so far away--to the other end of London. There are all