of his best) and let it hold him for a time that
enabled her to alter her attitude and present a fuller view. Without
other movement, but her back now to the sea and her face to the odd
person who had appropriated her corner, she had taken a sustained
look at him before he was aware she had stirred. On that apprehension,
however, he became also promptly aware of her direct, her applied
observation. As his sense of this quickly increased he wondered who she
was and what she wanted--what, as it were, was the matter with her; it
suggested to him, the next thing, that she had, under some strange idea,
actually been waiting for him. Any idea about him to-day on the part of
any one could only be strange.

Yes, she stood there with the ample width of the Marina between them,
but turned to him, for all the world, as to show frankly that she was
concerned with him. And she _was_--oh yes--a real lady: a middle-aged
person, of good appearance and of the best condition, in quiet but
"handsome" black, save for very fresh white kid gloves, and with a
pretty, dotty, becoming veil, predominantly white, adjusted to her
countenance; which through it somehow, even to his imperfect sight,
showed strong fine black brows and what he would have called on the spot
character. But she was pale; her black brows were the blacker behind
the flattering tissue; she still kept a hand, for support, on the
terrace-rail, while the other, at the end of an extended arm that had
an effect of rigidity, clearly pressed hard on the knob of a small and
shining umbrella, the lower extremity of whose stick was equally, was
sustainingly, firm on the walk. So this mature, qualified, important
person stood and looked at the limp, undistinguished--oh his values of
aspect now!--shabby man on the bench.

It was extraordinary, but the fact of her interest, by immensely
surprising, by immediately agitating him, blinded him at first to her
identity and, for the space of his long stare, diverted him from it;
with which even then, when recognition did break, the sense of the
shock, striking inward, simply consumed itself in gaping stillness. He
sat there motionless and weak, fairly faint with surprise, and there
was no instant, in all the succession of so many, at which Kate Cookham
could have caught the special sign of his intelligence. Yet that she
did catch something he saw--for he saw her steady herself, by her
two supported hands, to meet it; while, after she had don