she, said; and her face added plainly: 'I've
followed you.' Uninvited, she walked on at his side.

'This is not the same girl,' he thought, 'that I sent away five days
ago. She has lost something, gained something. I don't know her.'

There seemed such a stubborn purpose in her face and manner. It was like
the look in a dog's eyes that says: 'Master, you thought to shut me up
away from you; I know now what that is like. Do what you will, I mean in
future to be near you.'

This look, by its simplicity, frightened one to whom the primitive was
strange. Desiring to free himself of his companion, yet not knowing how,
Hilary sat down in Kensington Gardens on the first bench they came to.
The little model sat down beside him. The quiet siege laid to him by
this girl was quite uncanny. It was as though someone were binding him
with toy threads, swelling slowly into rope before his eyes. In this
fear of Hilary's there was at first much irritation. His fastidiousness
and sense of the ridiculous were roused. What did this little creature
with whom he had no thoughts and no ideas in common, whose spirit and
his could never hope to meet, think that she could get from him? Was she
trying to weave a spell over him too, with her mute, stubborn adoration?
Was she trying to change his protective weakness for her to another sort
of weakness? He turned and looked; she dropped her eyes at once, and sat
still as a stone figure.

As in her spirit, so in her body, she was different; her limbs looked
freer, rounder; her breath seemed stirring her more deeply; like a
flower of early June she was opening before his very eyes. This, though
it gave him pleasure, also added to his fear. The strange silence, in
its utter naturalness--for what could he talk about with her?--brought
home to him more vividly than anything before, the barriers of class.
All he thought of was how not to be ridiculous! She was inviting him in
some strange, unconscious, subtle way to treat her as a woman, as
though in spirit she had linked her round young arms about his neck, and
through her half-closed lips were whispering the eternal call of sex to
sex. And he, a middle-aged and cultivated man, conscious of everything,
could not even speak for fear of breaking through his shell of delicacy.
He hardly breathed, disturbed to his very depths by the young figure
sitting by his side, and by the dread of showing that disturbance.

Beside the cultivated plant the self-sown