with Mrs. Grose that, should the evening show improvement,
we would attend together the late service. The rain happily stopped,
and I prepared for our walk, which, through the park and by the
good road to the village, would be a matter of twenty minutes.
Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall, I remembered a pair
of gloves that had required three stitches and that had received them--
with a publicity perhaps not edifying--while I sat with the children
at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that cold,
clean temple of mahogany and brass, the "grown-up" dining room.
The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them.
The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered,
and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize,
on a chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted,
but to become aware of a person on the other side of the window
and looking straight in. One step into the room had sufficed;
my vision was instantaneous; it was all there. The person looking
straight in was the person who had already appeared to me.
He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness,
for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented
a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him,
catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same,
and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up,
the window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going
down to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass,
yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me
how intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--
long enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was
as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always.
Something, however, happened this time that had not happened before;
his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room,