an any
word in the language had ever had for him. He, Herbert Dodd, was to live
to "draw," like people, scarce hampered by the conditions of earth,
whom he had remotely and circuitously heard about, and in fact when he
walked back with her to where she had been sitting it was very much, for
his strained nerves, as if the very bench of desolation itself were to
be the scene of that exploit and he mightn't really live till he reached
it.

When they had sat down together she did press the spring of her
reticule, from which she took, not a handful of gold nor a packet of
crisp notes, but an oblong sealed letter, which she had thus waited on
him, she remarked, on purpose to deliver, and which would certify, with
sundry particulars, to the credit she had opened for him at a London
bank. He received it without looking at it--he held it, in the same
manner, conspicuous and unassimilated, for most of the rest of the
immediate time, appearing embarrassed with it, nervously twisting and
flapping it, yet thus publicly retaining it even while aware, beneath
everything, of the strange, the quite dreadful, wouldn't it be?
engagement that such inaction practically stood for. He could accept
money to that amount, yes--but not for nothing in return. For what then
in return? He kept asking himself for what, while she said other things
and made above all, in her high, shrewd, successful way the point that,
no, he needn't pretend that his conviction of her continued personal
interest in him wouldn't have tided him oyer any question besetting
him since their separation. She put it to him that the deep instinct of
where he should at last find her must confidently have worked for him,
since she confessed to her instinct of where she should find _him_;
which meant--oh it came home to him as he fingered his sealed
treasure!--neither more nor less than that she had now created
between them an equality of experience. He wasn't to have done all the
suffering, _she_ was to have "been through" things he couldn't even
guess at; and, since he was bargaining away his right ever again to
allude to the unforgettable, so much there was of it, what her tacit
proposition came to was that they were "square" and might start afresh.

He didn't take up her charge, as his so compromised "pride" yet in a
manner prompted him, that he had enjoyed all the week all those elements
of ease about her; the most he achieved for that was to declare, with an
ingenuity cont