them; he himself closing his eyes to the deepest detachment he was
capable of while he took in with a smothered sound of pain that this
was the conferred bounty by which Amy Evans sought most expressively to
encourage, to sustain and to reward. The motor had slackened and in a
moment would stop; and meanwhile even after lowering his hand again
she hadn't let it go. This enabled it, while he after a further moment
roused himself to a more confessed consciousness, to form with his
friend's a more active relation, to possess him of hers, in turn, and
with an intention the straighter that her glove had by this time somehow
come off. Bending over it without hinderance, he returned as firmly
and fully as the application of all his recovered wholeness of feeling,
under his moustache, might express, the consecration the bareness of
his own knuckles had received; only after which it was that, still thus
drawing out his grasp of her, and having let down their front glass by
his free hand, he signified to the footman his view of their stopping
short.

They had arrived; the high, closed _porte-cochere_, in its crested
stretch of wall, awaited their approach; but his gesture took effect,
the car pulled up at the edge of the pavement, the man, in an instant,
was at the door and had opened it; quickly moving across the walk, the
next moment, to press the bell at the gate. Berridge, as his hand now
broke away, felt he had cut his cable; with which, after he had stepped
out, he raised again the glass he had lowered and closed, its own being
already down, the door that had released him. During these motions he
had the sense of his companion, still radiant and splendid, but somehow
momentarily suppressed, suspended, silvered over and celestially
blurred, even as a summer moon by the loose veil of a cloud. So it was
he saw her while he leaned for farewell on the open window-ledge; he
took her in as her visible intensity of bright vagueness filled the
circle that the interior of the car made for her. It was such a state as
she would have been reduced to--he felt this, was certain of it--for the
first time in her life; and it was he, poor John Berridge, after all,
who would have created the condition.

"Good-night, Princess. I sha'n't see you again."

Vague was indeed no word for it--shine though she might, in her screened
narrow niche, as with the liquefaction of her pearls, the glimmer of her
tears, the freshness of her surprise. "You