and all her senses were preternaturally acute. But she
suffered, too, under the stress of her feeling; it blunted her, and
made her, on the one hand, regardless of everything outside it, on the
other, morbidly sensitive to trifles. She waited for him, hour after
hour, crouched in a corner of the sofa, or stretched at full length,
with closed eyes.

Long before it was time for him to come, she was stationed at the
window. She learned to know the people who appeared in the street
between the hours of four and six so accurately that she could have
described them blindfold. There was the oldfaced little girl who
delivered milk; there was the postman who emptied into his canvas
receptacle, the blue letter-box affixed to the opposite wall; the
student with the gashed face and red cap, who lived a couple of doors
further down, and always whistled the same tune; the big Newfoundland
dog that stalked majestically at his side, and answered to the name of
Tasso--she knew them all. These two last hours were weighted with lead.
He came, sometimes a poor half-hour too soon, but usually not till past
six o'clock. Never, in her life, had she waited for anyone like this,
and, towards the end of the time, a sense of injury, of more than
mortal endurance, would steal through her and dull her heart towards
him, in a way that frightened her.

When, at length, she saw him turn the corner, when she had caught and
answered his swift upward glance, she drew back into the shadow of the
room, and hid her face in her hands.

Then she listened.

He had the key of the little papered door in the wall. Between the
sound of his step on the stair, and the turning of the key in the lock,
there was time for her to undergo a moment of suspense that drove her
hand to her throat. What if, after the tension of the afternoon, her
heart, her nerves--parts of her over which she had no control--should
not take their customary bound towards him? What if her pulses should
not answer his? But before she could think her thought to the end, he
was there; and when she saw his kind eyes alight, his eager hands
outstretched, her nervous fears were vanquished. Maurice hardly gave
himself time to shut the door, before catching her to him in a long
embrace. And yet, though she did not suspect it, he, too, had a twinge
of uncertainty on entering. Her bodily presence still affected him with
a sense of strangeness--it took him a moment to get used to her again,
as it wer