“The one time you’ve passed my place?”

“Yes; you can fancy I haven’t many minutes to waste.  There was a place to-night I had to stop at.”

“I see, I see—­” he knew already so much about her work.  “It must be an awful grind—­for a lady.”

“It is, but I don’t think I groan over it any more than my companions—­and you’ve seen they’re not ladies!” She mildly jested, but with an intention.  “One gets used to things, and there are employments I should have hated much more.”  She had the finest conception of the beauty of not at least boring him.  To whine, to count up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shop-girl would do, and it was quite enough to sit there like one of these.

“If you had had another employment,” he remarked after a moment, “we might never have become acquainted.”

“It’s highly probable—­and certainly not in the same way.”  Then, still with her heap of gold in her lap and something of the pride of it in her manner of holding her head, she continued not to move—­she only smiled at him.  The evening had thickened now; the scattered lamps were red; the Park, all before them, was full of obscure and ambiguous life; there were other couples on other benches whom it was impossible not to see, yet at whom it was impossible to look.  “But I’ve walked so much out of my way with you only just to show you that—­that”—­with this she paused; it was not after all so easy to express—­“that anything you may have thought is perfectly true.”

“Oh I’ve thought a tremendous lot!” her companion laughed.  “Do you mind my smoking?”

“Why should I?  You always smoke there.”

“At your place?  Oh yes, but here it’s different.”

“No,” she said as he lighted a cigarette, “that’s just what it isn’t.  It’s quite the same.”

“Well, then, that’s because ‘there’ it’s so wonderful!”

“Then you’re conscious of how wonderful it is?” she returned.

He jerked his handsome head in literal protest at a doubt.  “Why that’s exactly what I mean by my gratitude for all your trouble.  It has been just as if you took a particular interest.”  She only looked at him by way of answer in such sudden headlong embarrassment, as she was quite aware, that while she remained silent he showed himself checked by her expression.  “You have—­haven’t you?—­taken a particular interest?”

“Oh a particular interest!” she quavered out, feeling the whole thing—­her headlong embarrassment—­get terribly the better of her, and wishing, with a sudden scare, all the more to keep her emotion down.  She maintained her fixed smile a moment and turned her eyes over the peopled darkness, unconfused now, because there was something much more confusing.  This, with a fatal great rush, was simply the fact that they were thus together.  They were near, near, and all she had imagined of that had only become more true, more dreadful and overwhelming.  She stared straight away in silence till she felt she looked an idiot; then, to say something, to say nothing, she attempted a sound which ended in a flood of tears.