"Some time in the night," he said, "from Cherbourg. And I'm staying at a
very grand hotel, which might be anywhere. A man I crossed with on the
steamer took me there. I think I'd move to one of the quieter ones, the
French ones, if I were a little surer of my pronunciation and the
subjunctive mood."

"You don't mean to say you've been studying French!"

He coloured a little, and laughed.

"You think it ridiculous at my time of life? I suppose you're right. You
should have seen me trying to understand the cabmen. The way these people
talk reminds me more of a Gatling gun than anything I can think of. It
certainly isn't human."

"Perhaps you have come over as ambassador," she suggested. "When I saw
you in the cab, even before I recognized you, I thought of a bit of our
soil broken off and drifted over here."

Her voice did not quite sustain the lighter note--the emotion his visit
was causing her was too great. He brought with him into her retreat not
so much a flood of memories as of sensations. He was a man whose image
time with difficulty obliterates, whose presence was a shining thing: so
she had grown to value it in proportion as she had had less of it. She
did inevitably recall the last time she had seen him, in the little
Western city, and how he had overwhelmed her, invaded her with doubts and
aroused the spirit which had possessed her to fight fiercely for its
foothold. And to-day his coming might be likened to the entrance of a
great physician into the room of a distant and lonely patient whom amidst