he going soon?"

"Who? Juliet? Oh, no! She was just saying so. I don't believe she's
engaged her passage yet."

There was invitation to greater ease in this, and her voice began to
have the tender, coaxing quality which had thrilled his heart when he
heard it first. But the space of her variance from his ideal was between
them, and the voice reached him faintly across it.

The situation grew more and more painful for her, he could see, as well
as for him. She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been
intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers
after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the
confidence of friends.

Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they
could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had
reduced them to silence. He could not recur to any of the things they
had written about; so far from wishing to do this, he had almost a
terror of touching upon them by accident, and he felt that she shrank
from them too, as if they involved a painful misunderstanding which
could not be put straight.

He asked questions about Upper Ashton Falls, but these led up to what
she had said of it in her letters; he tried to speak of the winter in
New York, and he remembered that every week he had given her a full
account of his life there. They must go beyond their letters or they
must fall far back of them.

VIII.

In their attempts to talk he was aware that she was seconding all his
endeavors with intelligence, and with a humorous subtlety to which he
could not pretend. She was suffering from their anomalous position as
much as he, but she had the means of enjoying it while he had not. After
half an hour of these defeats Mrs. Simpson operated a diversion by
coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of
sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then
to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of
cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn,
"Won't you take some lemonade? Won't you have a piece of cake?" and then
went out with her empty tray, and the air of having fulfilled the duties
of hospitality to her niece's company.

"I don't know," said Miss Simpson, "but it's rather early in the season
for _cold_ lemonade," and Langbourne, instead of laughing, as her tone
invited him to do, said:

"It's very good, I'm sure." But t