he'd come, but she had so curious a way
with her that he still less could say he wouldn't, and in a moment had
taken refuge in something that was neither. "Are you married?"--he put
it to her with that plainness, though it had seemed before he said it to
do more for him than while she waited before replying.

"No, I'm not married," she said; and then had another wait that might
have amounted to a question of what this had to do with it.

He surely couldn't have told her; so that he had recourse, a little
poorly as he felt, but to an "Oh!" that still left them opposed. He
turned away for it--that is for the poorness, which, lingering in the
air, had almost a vulgar platitude; and when he presently again wheeled
about she had fallen off as for quitting him, only with a pause, once
more, for a last look. It was all a bit awkward, but he had another
happy thought, which consisted in his silently raising his hat as for a
sign of dignified dismissal. He had cultivated of old, for the occasions
of life, the right, the discriminated bow, and now, out of the grey
limbo of the time when he could care for such things, this flicker of
propriety leaped and worked She might, for that matter, herself have
liked it; since, receding further, only with her white face toward him,
she paid it the homage of submission. He remained dignified, and she
almost humbly went.

V

Nothing in the world, on the Sunday afternoon, could have prevented
him from going; he was not after all destitute of three or four such
articles of clothing as, if they wouldn't particularly grace the
occasion, wouldn't positively dishonour it. That deficiency might have
kept him away, but no voice of the spirit, no consideration of pride. It
sweetened his impatience in fact--for he fairly felt it a long time
to wait--that his pride would really most find its account in his
acceptance of these conciliatory steps. From the moment he could put
it in that way--that he couldn't refuse to hear what she might have, so
very elaborately, to say for herself--he ought certainly to be at his
ease; in illustration of which he whistled odd snatches to himself as
he hung about on that cloud-dappled autumn Sunday, a mild private
minstrelsy that his lips hadn't known since when? The interval of the
twenty-four hours, made longer by a night of many more revivals than
oblivions, had in fact dragged not a little; in spite of which, however,
our extremely brushed-up and trimmed an