Mr. Gilman had written to her regularly; he had sent dazzling subscriptions to the Suffragette Union; and Audrey had replied regularly.  His letters were very simple, very modest, and quite touching.  They were dated from various coastal places.  However, he never came near Wimereux, though it was a coastal place.  Audrey had excusably deemed this odd; but Madame Piriac having once said with marked casualness, “I hinted to him that he might with advantage stay away,” Audrey had concealed her thoughts on the point.  And one of her thoughts was that Madame Piriac was keeping them apart so as to try them, so as to test their mutual feelings.  The policy, if it was a policy, was very like Madame Piriac; it had the effect of investing Mr. Gilman in Audrey’s mind with a peculiar romantic and wistful charm, as of a sighing and obedient victim.  Then Jane Foley and Rosamund had gone off somewhere, and Madame Piriac and Audrey had returned to Paris, and had found that practically all Paris had returned to Paris too.  And on the first meeting with Mr. Gilman it had been at once established that his feelings and those of Audrey had surmounted the Piriac test.  Within forty-eight hours all persons interested had mysteriously assumed that Mr. Gilman and Audrey were coupled together by fate and that a delicious crisis was about to supervene in their earthly progress.  And they had become objects of exquisite solicitude.  They had also become perfect.  A circle of friends and acquaintances waited in excited silence for a palpitating event, as a populace waits for the booming gunfire which is to inaugurate a national rejoicing.  And when the news exuded that he was taking her for a drive to Meudon, which she had never seen, alone, all decided beyond any doubt that he would do it during the drive.

Hence the nice constraint at the table when the drive grew publicly and avowedly imminent.

Audrey, as the phrase is, “felt her position keenly,” but not unpleasantly, nor with understanding.  Not a word had passed of late between herself and Mr. Gilman that any acquaintance might not have listened to.  Indeed, Mr. Gilman had become slightly more formal.  She liked him for that, as she liked him for a large number of qualities.  She did not know whether she loved him.  And strange to say, the question did not passionately interest her.  The only really interesting questions were:  Would he propose to her?  And would she accept him?  She had no logical ground for assuming that he would propose to her.  None of her friends had informed her of the general expectation that he would propose to her.  Yet she knew that everybody expected him to propose to her quite soon—­indeed within the next couple of hours.  And she felt that everybody was right.  The universe was full of mysteries for Audrey.  As regards her answer to any proposal, she foresaw—­another mystery—­that it would not depend upon self-examination or upon reason, or upon anything that could be defined.  It would depend upon an instinct over which her mind—­nay, even her heart—­had no control.  She was quite certainly aware that this instinct would instruct her brain to instruct her lips to say “Yes.”  The idea of saying “No” simply could not be conceived.  All the forces in the universe would combine to prevent her from saying “No.”