de the
raised seat in the midst of the little rock garden where they had talked
together five years before, she stood waiting for him, this tall simple
woman he had always adored since their first encounter, a little strange
and shy now in her dead black uniform of widowhood, but with her honest
eyes greeting him, her friendly hands held out to him. He would have
kissed them but for the restraining presence of Snagsby who had brought
him to her; as it was it seemed to him that the phantom of a kiss passed
like a breath between them. He held her hands for a moment and
relinquished them.

"It is so good to see you," he said, and they sat down side by side. "I
am very glad to see you again."

Then for a little while they sat in silence.

Mr. Brumley had imagined and rehearsed this meeting in many different
moods. Now, he found none of his premeditated phrases served him, and it
was the lady who undertook the difficult opening.

"I could not see you before," she began. "I did not want to see anyone."
She sought to explain. "I was strange. Even to myself. Suddenly----" She
came to the point. "To find oneself free.... Mr. Brumley,--_it was
wonderful!_"

He did not interrupt her and presently she went on again.

"You see," she said, "I have become a human being----owning myself. I
had never thought what this change would be to me.... It has been----.
It has been--like being born, when one hadn't realized before that one
wasn't born.... Now--now I can act. I can do this and that. I used to
feel as though I was on strings--with somebody able to pull.... There is
no one now able to pull at me, no one able to thwart me...."

Her dark eyes looked among the trees and Mr. Brumley watched her
profile.

"It has been like falling out of a prison from which one never hoped to
escape. I feel like a moth that has just come out of its case,--you know
how they come out, wet and weak but--released. For a time I feel I can
do nothing but sit in the sun."

"It's queer," she repeated, "how one tries to feel differently from what
one really feels, how one tries to feel as one supposes people expect
one to feel. At first I hardly dared look at myself.... I thought I
ought to be sorrowful and helpless.... I am not in the least sorrowful
or helpless....

"But," said Mr. Brumley, "are you so free?"

"Yes."

"Altogether?"

"As free now--as a man."

"But----people are saying in London----. Something about a will----."

Her lips clo