of his errand, began suddenly to represent a return from so far.
That was simply all--or rather a little less than all; for something
else had contributed. "I never dreamed you knew her," and "I never
dreamed _you_ did," were inevitably what had been exchanged between
them--supplemented by Mrs. Worthingham's mere scrap of an explanation:
"Oh yes--to the small extent you see. Two years ago in Switzerland
when I was at a high place for an 'aftercure,' during twenty days of
incessant rain, she was the only person in an hotel full of roaring,
gorging, smoking Germans with whom I could have a word of talk. She
and I were the only speakers of English, and were thrown together like
castaways on a desert island and in a raging storm. She was ill besides,
and she had no maid, and mine looked after her, and she was very
grateful--writing to me later on and saying she should certainly come to
see me if she ever returned to New York. She has returned, you see--and
there she was, poor little creature!" Such was Mrs. Worthingham's
tribute--to which even his asking her if Miss Rasch had ever happened
to speak of him caused her practically to add nothing. Visibly she had
never thought again of any one Miss Rasch had spoken of or anything Miss
Rasch had said; right as she was, naturally, about her being a
little clever queer creature. This was perfectly true, and yet it
was probably--by being _all_ she could dream of about her--what had
paralysed his proper gallantry. Its effect had been not in what it
simply stated, but in what, under his secretly disintegrating criticism,
it almost luridly symbolised.

He had quitted his seat in the Louis Quinze drawing-room without having,
as he would have described it, done anything but give the lady of the
scene a superior chance not to betray a defeated hope--not, that is,
to fail of the famous "pride" mostly supposed to prop even the most
infatuated women at such junctures; by which chance, to do her justice,
she had thoroughly seemed to profit. But he finally rose from his later
station with a feeling of better success. He had by a happy turn of his
hand got hold of the most precious, the least obscure of the flitting,
circling things that brushed his ears. What he wanted--as justifying for
him a little further consideration--was there before him from the moment
he could put it that Mrs. Worthingham had no data. He almost hugged that
word,--it suddenly came to mean so much to him. No data, he fel