As for the present,--let him only extricate himself from this coil in which
he stood, find his way back to activity and his rightful place, and many
things might look differently. Perhaps--who could say?--in the future, when
youth was still further forgotten by both of them, he and Eleanor might
after all take each other by the hand--sit down on either side of the same
hearth--their present friendship pass into one of another kind? It was
quite possible, only--

The sudden crash of a glass door made him look round. It was Miss Foster
who was hastening along the enclosed passage leading to the outer stair.
She had miscalculated the strength of the wind on the north side of the
house, and the glass door communicating with the library had slipped from
her hand. She passed Manisty with a rather scared penitent look, quickly
opened the outer door, and ran downstairs.

Manisty watched her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the
ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white
skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair
this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain
sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself--middle-class,
sabbatical neatness.

Manisty recalled his thoughts of the last half-hour with a touch of
amusement. He had been meditating on 'women'--the delightfulness of
'women,' his own natural inclination to their society. But how narrow is
everybody's world!

His collective noun of course had referred merely to that small, high-bred,
cosmopolitan class which presents types like Eleanor Burgoyne. And here
came this girl, walking through his dream, to remind him of what 'woman,'