"Ah I don't take walks at night! I'm going home after my work."

"Oh!"

That was practically what they had meanwhile smiled out, and his
exclamation to which for a minute he appeared to have nothing to add,
left them face to face and in just such an attitude as, for his part, he
might have worn had he been wondering if he could properly ask her to
come in. During this interval in fact she really felt his question to be
just "_How_ properly--?" It was simply a question of the degree of
properness.




CHAPTER XV


She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at
the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet
with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the
quiet stairs and well up the street together. This also must have been
in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly articulate,
for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be, later on, a
thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit of what just
here for a longish minute passed between them was his taking in her
thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed without pride or sound
or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of the cage, the very shop-
girl at large that she hugged the theory she wasn't. Yes, it was
strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could have come and gone