enough, that if, shortly before the girl's interest in his companion had
sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her immediate
vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his seventy words, of
preventing intelligibility. His words were mere numbers, they told her
nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was in possession of no name,
of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but a vague sweet sound and an
immense impression. He had been there but five minutes, he had smoked in
her face, and, busy with his telegrams, with the tapping pencil and the
conscious danger, the odious betrayal that would come from a mistake, she
had had no wandering glances nor roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had
taken him in; she knew everything; she had made up her mind.

He had come back from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair were
again shoulder to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their large
and complicated game. The fine soundless pulse of this game was in the
air for our young woman while they remained in the shop. While they
remained? They remained all day; their presence continued and abode with
her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the thousands of other
words she counted, she transmitted, in all the stamps she detached and
the letters she weighed and the change she gave, equally unconscious and
unerring in each of these particulars, and not, as the run on the little
office thickened with the afternoon hours, looking up at a single ugly
face in the long sequence, nor really hearing the stupid questions that
she patiently and perfectly answered. All patience was possible now, all
questions were stupid after his, all faces were ugly. She had been sure
she should see the lady again; and even now she should perhaps, she
should probably, see her often. But for him it was totally different;
she should never never see him. She wanted it too much. There was a
kind of wanting that helped--she had arrived, with her rich experience,
at that generalisation; and there was another kind that was fatal. It