they beat
their way down the narrow walk to the pier. Nasty weather, indeed; but
luckily, as it had turned out, there was no earthly reason why Darrow
should cross.

While he pushed on in the wake of his luggage his thoughts slipped back
into the old groove. He had once or twice run across the man whom Anna
Summers had preferred to him, and since he had met her again he had been
exercising his imagination on the picture of what her married life must
have been. Her husband had struck him as a characteristic specimen of
the kind of American as to whom one is not quite clear whether he
lives in Europe in order to cultivate an art, or cultivates an art as a
pretext for living in Europe. Mr. Leath's art was water-colour painting,
but he practised it furtively, almost clandestinely, with the disdain of
a man of the world for anything bordering on the professional, while
he devoted himself more openly, and with religious seriousness, to the
collection of enamelled snuff-boxes. He was blond and well-dressed, with
the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a
thin nose, and the habit of looking slightly disgusted--as who should
not, in a world where authentic snuff-boxes were growing daily harder to
find, and the market was flooded with flagrant forgeries?

Darrow had often wondered what possibilities of communion there could
have been between Mr. Leath and his wife. Now he concluded that there
had probably been none. Mrs. Leath's words gave no hint of her husband's
having failed to justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed
her. She spoke of him with a kind of impersonal seriousness, as if he
had been a character in a novel or a figure in history; and what she
said sounded as though it had been learned by heart and slightly dulled
by repetition. This fact immensely increased Darrow's impression that
his meeting with her had annihilated the intervening years. She, who was
always so elusive and inaccessible, had grown suddenly communicative and
kind: had opened the doors of her past, and tacitly left him to draw his
own conclusions. As a result, he had taken leave of her with the
sense that he was a being singled out and privileged, to whom she had
entrusted something precious to keep. It was her happiness in their
meeting that she had given him, had frankly left him to do with as he
willed; and the frankness of the gesture doubled the beauty of the gift.

Their next meeting had prolonged and de