after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.
An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear
to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced
me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone
else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind.
I had not seen it in Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere.
The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had,
on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance,
become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement
here with a deliberation with which I have never made it,
the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if,
while I took in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene
had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write,
the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped.
The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly
hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no
other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I
saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky,
the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over
the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame.
That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness,
of each person that he might have been and that he was not.
We were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me
to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few
instants more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know,
with regard to certain matters, the question of how long
they have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you