ething in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment; the
mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.

A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously
to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute of
chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or other
near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.

We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K. C.,
who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of Isabel's,
and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was in a
state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a game of
conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was impressing
the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in a
rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge,
and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of Merton to the Botanic
Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she got almost
her only chance with me.

"Last months at Oxford," she said.

"And then?" I asked.

"I'm coming to London," she said.

"To write?"

She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that quick
flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to work with
you. Why shouldn't I?"

3

Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a
handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on my
lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all that
it might mean to me.

It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusive
as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her gripped me,
fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing filled me with
pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no doubt that her value
in my life was tremendous. It made it none the less, that in those days
I was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out
of my life again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this
complex business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in
every love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath
the fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never
properly weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear
preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determi