oment the
down-going autumnal sun glanced wanly through the glades and lighted her
gossamer-gold hair with kindred gleams. The girl resumed her dreaming
progress, and Michael now frankly stared in a rapture. She was dressed
in deepest green box-cloth, and the heavy folds that clung to that
lissome form made her ankles behind great pompons of black silk seem
astonishingly slender. One hand was masked by a small muff of astrakhan;
the other curled behind to gather close her skirt. Her hair tied back
with a black bow sprayed her tall neck with its beaten gold. She came
along downcast until she was within a few feet of Michael; then she
looked at him. He smiled, and her mouth when she answered him with
answering smile was like a flower whose petals have been faintly
stirred. Indeed, it was scarcely a smile, scarcely more than a tremor,
but her eyes deepened suddenly, and Michael drawn into their dusky blue
exclaimed simply:

"I say, I've been watching you for a long time."

"I don't think you ought to talk to me like this in Kensington Gardens.
Why, there's not a soul in sight. And I oughtn't to let you talk."

Her voice was low with a provocative indolence of tone, and while she
spoke her lips scarcely moved, so that their shape was never for an
instant lost, and the words seemed to escape like unwilling fugitives.

"What are you reading?" she idly asked, tapping Michael's book with her
muff.

"Verlaine."

"French?"

He nodded, and she pouted in delicious disapproval of his learned
choice.

"Fancy reading French unless you've got to."

"But I enjoy these poems," Michael declared. "As a matter of fact you're
just like them. At least you were when I saw you first in the distance.
Now you're more real somehow."

Her gaze had wandered during his comparison and Michael, a little hurt
by her inattention, asked if she were expecting somebody.

"Oh, no. I just came out for a walk. I get a headache if I stay in all
the afternoon. Now I must go on. Good-bye."

She scattered with a light kick the little heap of leaves that during
their conversation she had been amassing, and with a half-mocking wave
of her muff prepared to leave him.

"I say, don't tear off," Michael begged. "Where do you live?"

"Oh, a long way from here," she said.

"But where?"

"West Kensington."

"So do I," cried Michael, thinking to himself that all the gods of luck
and love were fighting on his side this afternoon. "We'll walk home
toge