He had a strange sense of having come for something in particular; strange because literally there was nothing particular between them, nothing save that they were at one on their great point, which had long ago become a magnificent matter of course.

It was true that after she had said "You can always come now, you know," the thing he was there for seemed already to have happened.

He asked her if it was the death of her aunt that made the difference; to which she replied: "She never knew I knew you.

I wished her not to." The beautiful clearness of her candour--her faded beauty was like a summer twilight--disconnected the words from any image of deceit.

They might have struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had always given him a sense of noble reasons.