Server filled me.It showed her that if I watched her I also waited for her, and that I was therefore not affected in any manner she really need deprecate.She had been too far off for me to distinguish her face, but her approach had faltered long enough to let me see that if she had not taken it as too late she would, to escape me, have found some pretext for turning off.It was just my seating myself that made the difference--it was my being so ****** with her that brought her on.She came slowly and a little wearily down the vista, and her sad, shy advance, with the massed wood on either side of her, was like the reminiscence of a picture or the refrain of a ballad.What made the difference with ME--if any difference had remained to be made--was the sense of this sharp cessation of her public extravagance.She had folded up her manner in her flounced parasol, which she seemed to drag after her as a sorry soldier his musket.It was present to me without a pang that this was the person I had sent poor Briss off to find--the person poor Briss would owe me so few thanks for his failure to have found.It was equally marked to me that, however detached and casual she might, at the first sight of me, have wished to show herself, it was to alight on poor Briss that she had come out, it was because he had not been at the house and might therefore, on his side, be wandering, that she had taken care to be unaccompanied.My demonstration was complete from the moment I thus had them in the act of seeking each other, and I was so pleased at having gathered them in that I cared little what else they had missed.I neither moved nor spoke till she had come quite near me, and as she also gave no sound the meaning of our silence seemed to stare straight out.It absolutely phrased there, in all the wonderful conditions, a relation already established; but the strange and beautiful thing was that as soon as we had recognised and accepted it this relation put us almost at our ease."You must be weary of walking," I said at last, "and you see I've been keeping a seat for you."I had finally got up, as a sign of welcome, but I had directly afterwards resumed my position, and it was an illustration of the terms on which we met that we neither of us seemed to mind her being meanwhile on her feet.
She stood before me as if to take in--with her smile that had by this time sunk quite to dimness--more than we should, either of us, after all, be likely to be able to say.I even saw from this moment, I think, that, whatever she might understand, she would be able herself to say but little.She gave herself, in that minute, more than she doubtless knew--gave herself I mean, to my intenser apprehension.She went through the form of expression, but what told me everything was the way the form of expression broke down.
Her lovely grimace, the light of the previous hours, was as blurred as a bit of brushwork in water-colour spoiled by the upsetting of the artist's glass.She fixed me with it as she had fixed during the day forty persons, but it fluttered like a bird with a broken wing.She looked about and above, down each of our dusky avenues and up at our gilded tree-tops and our painted sky, where, at the moment, the passage of a flight of rooks made a clamour.
She appeared to wish to produce some explanation of her solitude, but Iwas quickly enough sure that she would never find a presentable one.Ionly wanted to show her how little I required it."I like a lonely walk,"I went on, "at the end of a day full of people: it's always, to me, on such occasions, quite as if something has happened that the mind wants to catch and fix before the vividness fades.So I mope by myself an hour--Itake stock of my impressions.But there's one thing I don't believe you know.This is the very first time, in such a place and at such an hour, that it has ever befallen me to come across a friend stricken with the same perversity and engaged in the same pursuit.Most people, don't you see?"--I kept it up as I could--"don't in the least know what has happened to them, and don't care to know.That's one way, and I don't deny it may be practically the best.But if one does care to know, that's another way.
