opposite him over their intensely white table-linen,
their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis,
thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her
grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the
warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and
then back again to his face and their human questions.

Their human questions became many before they had done--many more, as
one after the other came up, than our friend's free fancy had at all
foreseen. The sense he had had before, the sense he had had
repeatedly, the sense that the situation was running away with him, had
never been so sharp as now; and all the more that he could perfectly
put his finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its teeth. That
accident had definitely occurred, the other evening, after Chad's
dinner; it had occurred, as he fully knew, at the moment when he
interposed between this lady and her child, when he suffered himself so
to discuss with her a matter closely concerning them that her own
subtlety, marked by its significant "Thank you!" instantly sealed the
occasion in her favour. Again he had held off for ten days, but the
situation had continued out of hand in spite of that; the fact that it
was running so fast being indeed just WHY he had held off. What had
come over him as he recognised her in the nave of the church was that
holding off could be but a losing game from the instant she was worked
for not only by her subtlety, but by the hand of fate itself. If all
the accidents were to fight on her side--and by the actual showing they
loomed large--he could only give himself up. This was what he had done
in privately deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast
with him. What did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the
smash in which a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their
walk, their dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view,
their present talk and his present pleasure in it--to say nothing,
wonder of wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less,
accordingly, was his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up
at least the folly of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his
memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in
the hum of the town and the plash of the river. It WAS clearly better
to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by th