ributing to float him no small distance further, that of
course he had turned up at their old place of tryst, which had been,
through the years, the haunt of his solitude and the goal of his walk
any Sunday morning that seemed too beautiful for church; but that he
hadn't in the least built on her presence there--since that supposition
gave him, she would understand, wouldn't she? the air, disagreeable to
him, of having come in search of her. Her quest of himself, once he
had been seated there, would have been another matter--but in short
"Of course after all you did come to me, just now, didn't you?" He felt
himself, too, lamely and gracelessly grin, as for the final kick of his
honour, in confirmation of the record that he had then yielded but to
her humility. Her humility became for him at this hour and to this tune,
on the bench of desolation, a quantity more prodigious and even more
mysterious than that other guaranteed quantity the finger-tips of his
left hand could feel the tap by the action of his right; though what was
in especial extraordinary was the manner in which she could keep making
him such allowances and yet meet him again, at some turn, as with her
residuum for her clever self so great.

"Come to you, Herbert Dodd?" she imperturbably echoed. "I've been coming
to you for the last ten years!"

There had been for him just before this sixty supreme seconds of
intensest aspiration--a minute of his keeping his certificate poised
for a sharp thrust back at her, the thrust of the wild freedom of his
saying: "No, no, I _can't_ give them up; I can't simply sink them deep
down in my soul forever, with no cross in all my future to mark _that_
burial; so that if this is what our arrangement means I must decline to
have anything to do with it." The words none the less hadn't come, and
when she had herself, a couple of minutes later, spoken those
others, the blood rose to his face as if, given his stiffness and her
extravagance, he had just indeed saved himself.

Everything in fact stopped, even his fidget with his paper; she imposed
a hush, she imposed at any rate the conscious decent form of one, and
he couldn't afterward have told how long, at this juncture, he must have
sat simply gazing before him. It was so long, at any rate, that Kate
herself got up--and quite indeed, presently, as if her own forms were
now at an end. He had returned her nothing--so what was she waiting for?
She had been on the two other occ