is and Nan's way--ended
soon by some adjournment as visibly pointless as their sprawl.
Then, their backs turned, he would drop down on it, the bench of
desolation--which was what he, and he only, made it by sad adoption;
where, for that matter, moreover, once he had settled at his end, it
was marked that nobody else ever came to sit. He saw people, along the
Marina, take this liberty with other resting presences; but his own
struck them perhaps in general as either of too grim or just of too
dingy a vicinage. He might have affected the fellow-lounger as a man
evil, unsociable, possibly engaged in working out the idea of a
crime; or otherwise, more probably--for on the whole he surely looked
harmless--devoted to the worship of some absolutely unpractical remorse.

On a certain October Saturday he had got off, as usual, early; but the
afternoon light, his pilgrimage drawing to its aim, could still show
him, at long range, the rare case of an established usurper. His impulse
was then, as by custom, to deviate a little and wait, all the more
that the occupant of the bench was a lady, and that ladies, when alone,
were--at that austere end of the varied frontal stretch--markedly
discontinuous; but he kept on at sight of this person's rising, while he
was still fifty yards off, and proceeding, her back turned, to the edge
of the broad terrace, the outer line of which followed the interspaced
succession of seats and was guarded by an iron rail from the abruptly
lower level of the beach. Here she stood before the sea, while our
friend on his side, recognising no reason to the contrary, sank into the
place she had quitted. There were other benches, eastward and off by the
course of the drive, for vague ladies. The lady indeed thus thrust upon
Herbert's vision might have struck an observer either as not quite vague
or as vague with a perverse intensity suggesting design.

Not that our own observer at once thought of these things; he only took
in, and with no great interest, that the obtruded presence was a "real"
lady; that she was dressed--he noticed such matters--with a certain
elegance of propriety or intention of harmony; and that she remained
perfectly still for a good many minutes; so many in fact that he
presently ceased to heed her, and that as she wasn't straight before
him, but as far to the left as was consistent with his missing her
profile, he had turned himself to one of his sunsets again (though
it wasn't quite one