at what he had done. As soon
as he left her, he tried to comprehend what had happened: the change in
her was too marked for him to be able to console himself that he had
imagined it. Not only had she seemingly recovered, as if by magic, from
the lassitude of the winter--he could even have forgiven her the
alteration in her style of dress, although this, too, helped to
alienate her from him. But what he ended by recognising, with a jealous
throb, was that she had mentally recovered as well; she was once more
the self-contained girl he had first known, with a gift for keeping an
outsider beyond the circle of her thoughts and feelings. An outsider!
The weeks of intimate companionship were forgotten, seemed never to
have been. She had no further need of him, that was the clue to the
mystery, and the end of the matter.

And so it continued, the next day, and the next again; Louise
deliberately avoided touching on anything that lay below the surface.
She vouchsafed no explanation of the words that had disquieted him, nor
was the letter Maurice had written her once mentioned between them.

But, though she seemed resolved not to confide in him, she could not
dispense with the small, practical services, he was able to render her.
They were even more necessary to her than before; for, if one thing was
clear, it was that she no longer intended to cloister herself up inside
her four walls: the day after her return, she had been out till late in
the afternoon, and had come home with her hands full of parcels. She
took it now as a matter of course that Maurice should accompany her;
and did not, or would not, notice his abstraction.

After the lapse of a very short time, however, the young man began to
feel that there was something feverish in the continual high level of
her mood. She broke down, once or twice, in trying to sustain it, and
was more of her eloquently silent self again: one evening, he came upon
her, in the dusk, when she was sitting with her chin on her hand,
looking out before her with the old questioning gaze.

Occasionally he thought that she was waiting for something: in the
middle of a sentence, she would break off, and grow absent-minded; and
more than once, the unexpected advent of the postman threw her into a
state of excitement, which she could not conceal. She was waiting for a
letter. But Maurice was proud, and asked no questions; he took pains to
use the cool, friendly tone, she herself adopted.

Not