n an abject little exposure of dreadful
impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back.
He had once more left town, and a first week elapsed, and a second. He
had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate; she had
insisted--she knew how to insist, and he couldn't put in another hour.
There was always a day when she called time. It was known to our young
friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other
offices. She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier
sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of
distinctness--it all bounced out.

CHAPTER XXII

Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she should
never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out that
she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl at the
P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast on him
lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak to him,
had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her alone. Never
so much as during these latter days had she felt the precariousness of
their relation--the happy beautiful untroubled original one, if it could
only have been restored--in which the public servant and the casual
public only were concerned. It hung at the best by the merest silken
thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and might snap at any
minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of
actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete. She
would just give him a few days more to come back to her on a proper
impersonal basis--for even to an embarrassing representative of the
casual public a public servant with a conscience did owe something--and
then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was ready for the little home.
It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at
Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered,
with their respectively darkened brows, before the niche into which it
was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.

He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations
had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the
greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior
even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered
that in the face of it she hung on at