than I've _not?_" she said, "and that seems a very long time."
She understood how we had jogged together over hill and dale and how
inevitable it was that we should now rest together. I'm definite about
all this because what followed is so strange that it's a kind of relief
to me to mark the point up to which our relations were as natural as
ever. It was I myself who in a sudden madness altered and destroyed
them. I see now that she gave me no pretext and that I only found one in
the way she looked at the fine face in the Bond Street frame. How then
would I have had her look at it? What I had wanted from the first was
to make her care for him. Well, that was what I still wanted--up to the
moment of her having promised me that he would on this occasion really
aid me to break the silly spell that had kept them asunder. I had
arranged with him to do his part if she would as triumphantly do hers. I
was on a different footing now--I was on a footing to answer for him. I
would positively engage that at five on the following Saturday he would
be on that spot. He was out of town on pressing business; but pledged
to keep his promise to the letter he would return on purpose and in
abundant time. "Are you perfectly sure?" I remember she asked, looking
grave and considering: I thought she had turned a little pale. She was
tired, she was indisposed: it was a pity he was to see her after all at
so poor a moment. If he only _could_ have seen her five years before!
However, I replied that this time I was sure and that success therefore
depended simply on herself. At five o'clock on the Saturday she would
find him in a particular chair I pointed out, the one in which he
usually sat and in which--though this I didn't mention--he had been
sitting when, the week before, he put the question of our future to me
in the way that had brought me round. She looked at it in silence, just
as she had looked at the photograph, while I repeated for the twentieth
time that it was too preposterous it shouldn't somehow be feasible to
introduce to one's dearest friend one's second self. "_Am_ I your dearest
friend?" she asked with a smile that for a moment brought back her
beauty. I replied by pressing her to my bosom; after which she said:
"Well, I'll come. I'm extraordinarily afraid, but you may count on me."

When she had left me I began to wonder what she was afraid of, for
she had spoken as if she fully meant it. The next day, late in the
afternoon,