She met Terence frequently.  When they did not meet, he was apt to send a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all to neglect that approach to intimacy.  But sometimes he did not come or did not write for several days at a time.  Again when they met their meeting might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair.  Over all their partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.

If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more completely ignorant of his.  At first he moved as a god; as she came to know him better he was still the centre of light, but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring and confident of herself.  She was conscious of emotions and powers which she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown.  When she thought of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned, representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of him drawn across the room to stand by her side.  This passage across the room amounted to a physical sensation, but what it meant she did not know.

Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface.  Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days accumulated their small events which shaped the year.  Superficially, three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about five inches of her embroidery, and St. John completed the first two acts of a play.  He and Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to her, and she was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his rhythms and the variety of his adjectives, as well as by the fact that he was Terence’s friend, that he began to wonder whether he was not intended for literature rather than for law.  It was a time of profound thought and sudden revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.

A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise.  Rachel still went to church, because she had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to think about it.  Since they had celebrated the service at the hotel she went there expecting to get some pleasure from her passage across the garden and through the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether she would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking to him.

As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday.  The English could not pale the sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety.  The best clothes which every one put on helped the general