oved towards her, and stood devouring her with his eyes, and hers
sought his.

'This is Rodd,' said the bookseller. 'Adnor Rodd, a great friend of
mine.'

'Rodd,' repeated Clara.

'He is very much interested in the theatre,' said the bookseller.

'I was just looking at Charles Mann's new book.... Will you let me
give it you?'

He moved away to pick up the book and came back clutching it, took out
his fountain pen and wrote in it in a small, precise hand,--

'To my friend, from Adnor Rodd.'

'My name is Clara Day,' said she,

'You can't have a name yet.... You are just you.'

She understood him. He meant that externals were of no account in the
delighted shock of their meeting. As they stood gazing at each other
the book-shop vanished, London disappeared, there was nothing but they
two on all the earth. Neither could move. The beginning and the end
were in this moment. Nothing that they could do could alter it or make
the world again as it had been for them.... Consciously neither
admitted it, both stubbornly clung to what they had made of their lives.

He still held the book in his hand. She had not put out hers for it.
He wrote 'Clara Day,' and he wanted to write it down several times as
he did with the names of the persons in his plays, to make certain that
they were rightly called.

With a faintly recurrent sense of actuality he thought of his three
rooms in Bloomsbury and of the hundred and fifty pounds a year on which
he lived, and with a wry smile he handed her the book, took stock of
her rich clothes, bowed and turned away.... For his imagination it was
enough to have met and loved her in that one moment. She had broken
down the intellectual detachment in which he lived: the icy solitude in
which so painfully he struggled on was at an end.

So quickly had he moved that she was taken by surprise, and he had
reached the threshold of the shop before she ran after him and touched
him on the arm.

'Please,' she said. 'You have forgotten one thing--the date.'

He wrote the date in the book, and was for going, but she said,--

'I must know more of you if I am to accept your gift.'

'You talk such perfect English,' he said, marvelling at her. 'People
do not talk like that nowadays, but a slipshod jargon.'

'I have lived abroad,' she told him, and without more they walked out
into the street together, she hugging the book very dose.

They had walked some distance in silence before he sp