f Society, local and
transient, at St. Bernard's, and in this trim he took his way westward;
occupied largely, as he went, it might have seemed to any person
pursuing the same course and happening to observe him, in a fascinated
study of the motions of his shadow, the more or less grotesque shape
projected, in front of him and mostly a bit to the right, over the
blanched asphalt of the Parade and dandling and dancing at such a rate,
shooting out and then contracting, that, viewed in themselves, its
eccentricities might have formed the basis of an interesting challenge:
"Find the state of mind, guess the nature of the agitation, possessing
the person so remarkably represented!" Herbert Dodd, for that matter,
might have been himself attempting to make by the sun's sharp aid some
approach to his immediate horoscope.

It had at any rate been thus put before him that the dandling and
dancing of his image occasionally gave way to perfect immobility, when
he stopped and kept his eyes on it. "Suppose she should come, suppose
she _should!_" it is revealed at least to ourselves that he had at
these moments audibly breathed--breathed with the intensity of an arrest
between hope and fear. It had glimmered upon him from early, with the
look of the day, that, given all else that could happen, this would be
rather, as he put it, in her line; and the possibility lived for him, as
he proceeded, to the tune of a suspense almost sickening. It was, from
one small stage of his pilgrimage to another, the "For ever, never!"
of the sentimental case the playmates of his youth used to pretend
to settle by plucking the petals of a daisy. But it came to his truly
turning faint--so "queer" he felt--when, at the gained point of the
long stretch from which he could always tell, he arrived within positive
sight of his immemorial goal. His seat was taken and she was keeping it
for him--it could only be _she_ there in possession; whereby it shone
out for Herbert Dodd that if he hadn't been quite sure of her recurrence
she had at least been quite sure of his. _That_ pulled him up to some
purpose, where recognition began for them--or to the effect, in other
words, of his pausing to judge if he could bear, for the sharpest note
of their intercourse, this inveterate demonstration of her making him do
what she liked. What settled the question for him then--and just
while they avowedly watched each other, over the long interval, before
closing, as if, on eith