man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The
one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
seemed, understood without knowing.

In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity
affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in
morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn
might have been. There were moments when, in the strange
dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie
between them.

To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday
afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days
were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his
wanderings now usually led him to the Park and its outlying
regions.

One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park
gates and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a
gray afternoon streaked with east wind. Glennard's cab advanced
slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at
the deserted paths that wound under bare boughs between grass
banks of premature vividness, his attention was arrested by two
figures walking ahead of him. This couple, who had the path to
themselves,moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait
to a conversation marked by meditative intervals. Now and then
they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward
her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife's profile.
The man was Flamel.