“My friends are kind enough to say that I have a cat-like tread; I know not how that may be; at any rate the carpet I was walking upon was thick enough to smother a heavier footfall:  not until I was quite close to her did my hostess become aware of my presence.  Then she started violently and looked over her shoulder at me with dilating eyes.  Evidently a nervous creature, I saw the pulse in her throat, strained by her attitude, flutter like a terrified bird.

“The next instant she had stretched out her hand with sweet English words of welcome, and the face, which I had been comparing in my mind to that of Guido’s Cenci, became transformed by the arch and exquisite smile of a Greuse.  For more than two years I had had no intercourse with any of my nationality.  I could conceive the sound of his native tongue under such circumstances moving a man in a curious unexpected fashion.

“I babbled some commonplace reply, after which there was silence while we stood opposite each other, she looking at me expectantly.  At length, with a sigh checked by a smile and an overtone of sadness in a voice that yet tried to be sprightly: 

“‘Am I then so changed, Mr. Marshfield?’ she asked.  And all at once I knew her:  the girl whose nightingale throat had redeemed the desolation of the evenings at Rathdrum, whose sunny beauty had seemed (even to my celebrated cold-blooded aestheticism) worthy to haunt a man’s dreams.  Yes, there was the subtle curve of the waist, the warm line of throat, the dainty foot, the slender tip-tilted fingers—­witty fingers, as I had classified them—­which I now shook like a true Briton, instead of availing myself of the privilege the country gave me, and kissing her slender wrist.

“But she was changed; and I told her so with unconventional frankness, studying her closely as I spoke.

“‘I am afraid,’ I said gravely, ‘that this place does not agree with you.’

“She shrank from my scrutiny with a nervous movement and flushed to the roots of her red-brown hair.  Then she answered coldly that I was wrong, that she was in excellent health, but that she could not expect any more than other people to preserve perennial youth (I rapidly calculated she might be two-and-twenty), though, indeed, with a little forced laugh, it was scarcely flattering to hear one had altered out of all recognition.  Then, without allowing me time to reply, she plunged into a general topic of conversation which, as I should have been obtuse indeed not to take the hint, I did my best to keep up.

“But while she talked of Vienna and Warsaw, of her distant neighbors, and last year’s visitors, it was evident that her mind was elsewhere; her eye wandered, she lost the thread of her discourse, answered me at random, and smiled her piteous smile incongruously.

“However lonely she might be in her solitary splendor, the company of a countryman was evidently no such welcome diversion.