e did not greatly wish to be; two concerts,
two walks with her alone, when all that he had said seemed as nothing
said, and all her sayings but ghosts of what he wished to hear; a week of
confusion, day and night, until, a few minutes ago, her handkerchief had
fallen from her glove on to the dusty road, and he had picked it up and
put it to his lips. Nothing could take away the look she had given him
then. Nothing could ever again separate her from him utterly. She had
confessed in it to the same sweet, fearful trouble that he himself was
feeling. She had not spoken, but he had seen her lips part, her breast
rise and fall. And HE had not spoken. What was the use of words?

He felt in the pocket of his coat. There, against his fingers, was that
wisp of lawn and lace, soft, yet somehow alive; and stealthily he took it
out. The whole of her, with her fragrance, seemed pressed to his face in
the touch of that lawn border, roughened by little white stars. More
secretly than ever he put it back; and for the first time looked round.
These people! They belonged to a world that he had left. They gave him
the same feeling that her uncle and aunt had given him just now, when
they said good-night, following her into their hotel. That good Colonel,
that good Mrs. Ercott! The very concretion of the world he had been
brought up in, of the English point of view; symbolic figures of health,
reason, and the straight path, on which at that moment, seemingly, he had
turned his back. The Colonel's profile, ruddy through its tan, with grey
moustache guiltless of any wax, his cheery, high-pitched: "Good-night,
young Lennan!" His wife's curly smile, her flat, cosy, confidential
voice--how strange and remote they had suddenly become! And all these
people here, chattering, drinking--how queer and far away! Or was it
just that he was queer and remote to them?

And getting up from his table, he passed the fiddlers with the dark-white
skins, out into the Place.

II

He went up the side streets to the back of her hotel, and stood by the
railings of the garden--one of those hotel gardens which exist but to
figure in advertisements, with its few arid palms, its paths staring
white between them, and a fringe of dusty lilacs and mimosas.

And there came to him the oddest feeling--that he had been there before,
peering through blossoms at those staring paths and shuttered windows. A
scent of wood-smoke was abroad, and some dry plan