t," I exclaimed in wonder.

With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost painstaking precision (her
very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and no
more), she said that, yes, the thought came into her head. This makes
one shudder at the mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For this was
a thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come from the
depths of that sort of experience which she had not had, and went far
beyond a young girl's possible conception of the strongest and most
veiled of human emotions.

"He was there, of course?" I said.

"Yes, he was there." She saw him on the path directly she stepped
outside the porch. He was very still. It was as though he had been
standing there with his face to the door for hours.

Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tenderness, he must have
been ready for any extravagance of conduct. Knowing the profound silence
each night brought to that nook of the country, I could imagine them
having the feeling of being the only two people on the wide earth. A row
of six or seven lofty elms just across the road opposite the cottage made
the night more obscure in that little garden. If these two could just
make out each other that was all.

"Well! And were you very much terrified?" I asked.

She made me wait a little before she said, raising her eyes: "He was
gentleness itself."

I noticed three abominable, drink-sodden loafers, sallow and dirty, who
had come to range themselves in a row within ten feet of us against the
front of the public-house. They stared at Flora de Barral's back with
unseeing, mournful fixity.

"Let's move this way a little," I proposed.

She turned at once and we made a few paces; not too far to take us out of
sight of the hotel door, but very nearly. I could just keep my eyes on
it. After all, I had not been so very long with the girl. If you were
to disentangle the words we actually exchanged from my comments you would
see that they were not so very many, including everything she had so
unexpectedly told me of her story. No, not so very many. And now it
seemed as though there would be no more. No! I could expect no more.
The confidence was wonderful enough in its nature as far as it went, and
perhaps not to have been expected from any other girl under the sun. And
I felt a little ashamed. The origin of our intimacy was too gruesome. It
was as if listening to her I had taken advantage