“I didn’t know you at first.  Are you taking a walk?”

“Ah I don’t take walks at night!  I’m going home after my work.”

“Oh!”

That was practically what they had meanwhile smiled out, and his exclamation to which for a minute he appeared to have nothing to add, left them face to face and in just such an attitude as, for his part, he might have worn had he been wondering if he could properly ask her to come in.  During this interval in fact she really felt his question to be just “How properly—?” It was simply a question of the degree of properness.

CHAPTER XV

She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the quiet stairs and well up the street together.  This also must have been in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly articulate, for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be, later on, a thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit of what just here for a longish minute passed between them was his taking in her thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed without pride or sound or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of the cage, the very shop-girl at large that she hugged the theory she wasn’t.  Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could have come and gone and yet not disfigured the dear little intense crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the horrid notes of that kind of acquaintance.  He had taken no liberty, as she would have so called it; and, through not having to betray the sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none.  On the spot, nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that, if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked independence.  This was one of the questions he was to leave her to deal with—­the question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women.  Could people of his sort do that without what people of her sort would call being “false to their love”?  She had already a vision of how the true answer was that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter—­didn’t count as infidelity, counted only as something else:  she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what.

Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty corner of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one of the smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular word about it—­they were talking so of other things—­they crossed the street and went in and sat down on a bench.  She had gathered by this time one magnificent hope about him—­the