audible, and wavered as if she could scarcely keep
herself from tears.

"Good heavens!" Ralph exclaimed to himself. "She loves me! Why did I
never see it before? She's going to cry; no, but she can't speak."

The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was
doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made
up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him
seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.
He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he
should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and devastating
nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once more.

In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out
of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a dissolving
and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the moment,
represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings and
thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own mind.
At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at the
next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was
repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to
disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly
race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist's shop
directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop windows,
and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of women looking
in at the great windows of a large draper's shop. This discipline having
given him at least a superficial control of himself, he was about to
turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his eye was caught by a
tall figure walking quickly along the opposite pavement--a tall figure,
upright, dark, and commanding, much detached from her surroundings. She
held her gloves in her left hand, and the left hand was bare. All this
Ralph noticed and enumerated and recognized before he put a name to the
whole--Katharine Hilbery. She seemed to be looking for somebody. Her
eyes, in fact, scanned both sides of the street, and for one second were
raised directly to the bow window in which Ralph stood; but she looked
away again instantly without giving any sign that she had seen him. This
sudden apparition had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was as if he
had thought of her so intensely that his mind had formed the shape
of her,