at, under the flag of her old reputation for easy
response. She had given to the breeze any sad scrap of a substitute, for
the play of mind once supposed remarkable. The last of all the things
her stillness said to me was that I could judge from so poor a show what
had become of her conversability. What I did judge was that a frantic
art had indeed been required to make her pretty silences pass, from one
crisis to another, for pretty speeches. Half this art, doubtless, was
the glittering deceit of her smile, the sublime, pathetic overdone
geniality which represented so her share in any talk that, every other
eloquence failing, there could only be nothing at all from the moment it
abandoned its office. There _was_ nothing at all. That was the truth; in
accordance with which I finally--for everything it might mean to
myself--put out my hand and bore ever so gently on her own. Her own
rested listlessly on the stone of our seat. Of course, it had been an
immense thing for her that she was, in spite of everything, so lovely.

All this was quite consistent with its eventually coming back to me
that, though she took from me with appreciation what was expressed in
the gesture I have noted, it was certainly in quest of a still deeper
relief that she had again come forth. The more I considered her
face--and most of all, so permittedly, in her passive, conscious
presence--the more I was sure of this and the further I could go in the
imagination of her beautiful duplicity. I ended by divining that if I
was assuredly good for her, because the question of keeping up with me
had so completely dropped, and if the service I so rendered her was not
less distinct to her than to myself--I ended by divining that she had
none the less her obscure vision of a still softer ease. Guy Brissenden
had become in these few hours her positive need--a still greater need
than I had lately amused myself with making out that he had found her.
Each had, by their unprecedented plight, something for the other, some
intimacy of unspeakable confidence, that no one else in the world could
have for either. They had been feeling their way to it, but at the end
of their fitful day they had grown confusedly, yet beneficently sure.
The explanation here again was simple--they had the sense of a common
fate. They hadn't to name it or to phrase it--possibly even couldn't had
they tried; peace and support came to them, without that, in the simple
revelation of each othe