nd the mood of that man clearly. He
was violent. But she had gone beyond the point where things matter.
What would he think of her coming down to him--as he would naturally
suppose. And even that didn't matter. He could not despise her more
than she despised herself. She must have been light-headed because the
thought came into her mind that should he get into ungovernable fury
from disappointment, and perchance strangle her, it would be as good a
way to be done with it as any.

"You had that thought," I exclaimed in wonder.

With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost painstaking precision
(her very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and
no more), she said that, yes, the thought came into her head. This
makes one shudder at the mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For
this was a thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come
from the depths of that sort of experience which she had not had, and
went far beyond a young girl's possible conception of the strongest and
most veiled of human emotions.

"He was there, of course?" I said.

"Yes, he was there." She saw him on the path directly she stepped
outside the porch. He was very still. It was as though he had been
standing there with his face to the door for hours.

Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tenderness, he must have
been ready for any extravagance of conduct. Knowing the profound
silence each night brought to that nook of the country, I could imagine
them having the feeling of being the only two people on the wide earth.
A row of six or seven lofty elms just across the road opposite the
cottage made the night more obscure in that little garden. If these two
could just make out each other that was all.

"Well! And were you very much terrified?" I asked.

She made me wait a little before she said, raising her eyes: "He was
gentleness itself."

I noticed three abominable, drink-sodden loafers, sallow and dirty, who
had come to range themselves in a row within ten feet of us against the
front of the public-house. They stared at Flora de Barral's back with
unseeing, mournful fixity. "Let's move this way a little," I proposed.

She turned at once and we made a few paces; not too far to take us out
of sight of the hotel door, but very nearly. I could just keep my eyes
on it. After all, I had not been so very long with the girl. If you
were to disentangle the words we actually exchang