hovering just the faintest suggestion of a timid smile. And this time
she lingered with him past Queen's Crescent and the Malden Road, till
he turned into Carlton Street. It was dark in the passage, and he had
to grope his way up the stairs, but with his hand on the door of the
bed-sitting room on the third floor he felt less afraid of the solitude
that would rise to meet him.

All day long in the dingy back office in Abingdon Street, Westminster,
where from ten to six each day he sat copying briefs and petitions, he
thought over what he would say to her; tactful beginnings by means of
which he would slide into conversation with her. Up Portland Place he
would rehearse them to himself. But at Cambridge Gate, when the little
fawn gloves came in view, the words would run away, to join him again
maybe at the gate into the Chester Road, leaving him meanwhile to pass
her with stiff, hurried steps and eyes fixed straight in front of him.
And so it might have continued, but that one evening she was no longer
at her usual seat. A crowd of noisy children swarmed over it, and
suddenly it seemed to him as if the trees and flowers had all turned
drab. A terror gnawed at his heart, and he hurried on, more for the
need of movement than with any definite object. And just beyond a bed
of geraniums that had hidden his view she was seated on a chair, and
stopping with a jerk absolutely in front of her, he said, quite angrily:

"Oh! there you are!"

Which was not a bit the speech with which he had intended to introduce
himself, but served his purpose just as well--perhaps better.

She did not resent his words or the tone.

"It was the children," she explained. "They wanted to play; so I
thought I would come on a little farther."

Upon which, as a matter of course, he took the chair beside her, and it
did not occur to either of them that they had not known one another
since the beginning, when between St. John's Wood and Albany Street God
planted a garden.

Each evening they would linger there, listening to the pleading passion
of the blackbird's note, the thrush's call to joy and hope. He loved
her gentle ways. From the bold challenges, the sly glances of
invitation flashed upon him in the street or from some neighbouring
table in the cheap luncheon room he had always shrunk confused and
awkward. Her shyness gave him confidence. It was she who was half
afraid, whose eyes would fall beneath his gaze, who would tremble at