pulled herself round to precautions. She only knew she had turned
away, and that this movement must have sooner or later determined
his rising to join her, his deciding to accept it, gracefully and
condoningly--condoningly in respect to her natural emotion, her
inevitable little pang--for an intimation that they would be better on
their feet.

They trod then afresh their ancient paths; and though it pressed upon
her hatefully that he must have taken her abruptness for a smothered
shock, the flare-up of her old feeling at the breath of his news, she
had still to see herself condemned to allow him this, condemned
really to encourage him in the mistake of believing her suspicious of
feminine spite and doubtful of Miss Lindeck's zeal. She was so far
from doubtful that she was but too appalled at it and at the officious
mass in which it loomed, and this instinct of dread, before their walk
was over, before she had guided him round to one of the smaller gates,
there to slip off again by herself, was positively to find on the
bosom of her flood a plank by the aid of which she kept in a manner
and for the time afloat. She took ten minutes to pant, to blow gently,
to paddle disguisedly, to accommodate herself, in a word, to the
elements she had let loose; but as a reward of her effort at least she
then saw how her determined vision accounted for everything. Beside
her friend on the bench she had truly felt all his cables cut, truly
swallowed down the fact that if he still perceived she was pretty--and
_how_ pretty!--it had ceased appreciably to matter to him. It had
lighted the folly of her preliminary fear, the fear of his even yet to
some effect of confusion or other inconvenience for her, proving
more alive to the quotable in her, as she had called it, than to the
inexpressible. She had reckoned with the awkwardness of that possible
failure of his measure of her charm, by which his renewed apprehension