h indeed at so other a crisis, the form
of the "glimmering square" of the poet; yet, for a still more remarkable
fact, with an incongruous object usurping at a given instant the
privilege of the frame and seeming, even as he looked, to block the
view.

The incongruous object was a woman's head, crowned with a little
sparsely feathered black hat, an ornament quite unlike those the women
mostly noticed by White-Mason were now "wearing," and that grew and
grew, that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the
manner of images in the kinematograph. It had presently loomed so large
that he saw nothing else--not only among the things at a considerable
distance, the things Mrs. Worthingham would eventually, yet
unmistakably, introduce him to, but among those of this lady's various
attributes and appurtenances as to which he had been in the very act of
cultivating his consciousness. It was in the course of another minute
the most extraordinary thing in the world: everything had altered,
dropped, darkened, disappeared; his imagination had spread its wings
only to feel them flop all grotesquely at its sides as he recognised in
his hostess's quiet companion, the oppressive alien who hadn't indeed
interfered with his fanciful flight, though she had prevented his
immediate declaration and brought about the thud, not to say the felt
violent shock, of his fall to earth, the perfectly plain identity of
Cornelia Rasch. It was she who had remained there at attention; it was
she their companion hadn't introduced; it was she he had forborne to
face with his fear of incivility. He stared at her--everything else
went.

"Why it has been _you_ all this time?"

Miss Rasch fairly turned pale. "I was waiting to see if you'd know me."

"Ah, my dear Cornelia"--he came straight out with it--"rather!"

"Well, it isn't," she returned with a quick change to red now, "from
having taken much time to look at me!"

She smiled, she even laughed, but he could see how she had felt his
unconsciousness, poor thing; the acquaintance, quite the friend of his
youth, as she had been, the associate of his childhood, of his early
manhood, of his middle age in fact, up to a few years back, not more
than ten at the most; the associate too of so many of his associates and
of almost all of his relations, those of the other time, those who had
mainly gone for ever; the person in short whose noted disappearance,
though it might have seemed final, had be