But Mark Lennan, at one of the little marble-topped tables, was in too great maze and exaltation of spirit and of senses to be conscious of its glare and babel, even of its beauty.  He sat so very still that his neighbours, with the instinctive aversion of the human creature to what is too remote from its own mood, after one good stare, turned their eyes away, as from something ludicrous, almost offensive.

He was lost, indeed, in memory of the minutes just gone by.  For it had come at last, after all these weeks of ferment, after all this strange time of perturbation.

Very stealthily it had been creeping on him, ever since that chance introduction nearly a year ago, soon after he settled down in London, following those six years of Rome and Paris.  First the merest friendliness, because she was so nice about his work; then respectful admiration, because she was so beautiful; then pity, because she was so unhappy in her marriage.  If she had been happy, he would have fled.  The knowledge that she had been unhappy long before he knew her had kept his conscience still.  And at last one afternoon she said:  “Ah! if you come out there too!” Marvelously subtle, the way that one little outslipped saying had worked in him, as though it had a life of its own—­like a strange bird that had flown into the garden of his heart, and established itself with its new song and flutterings, its new flight, its wistful and ever clearer call.  That and one moment, a few days later in her London drawing-room, when he had told her that he was coming, and she did not, could not, he felt, look at him.  Queer, that nothing momentous said, done—­or even left undone—­had altered all the future!

And so she had gone with her uncle and aunt, under whose wing one might be sure she would meet with no wayward or exotic happenings.  And he had received from her this little letter: 

“Hotel coeur D’OR,

“Monte Carlo.

“My dear mark,

“We’ve arrived.  It is so good to be in the sun.  The flowers are wonderful.  I am keeping Gorbio and Roquebrune till you come.

“Your friend,

“Olive Cramier.”

That letter was the single clear memory he had of the time between her going and his following.  He received it one afternoon, sitting on an old low garden wall with the spring sun shining on him through apple-trees in blossom, and a feeling as if all the desire of the world lay before him, and he had but to stretch out his arms to take it.

Then confused unrest, all things vague; till at the end of his journey he stepped out of the train at Beaulieu with a furiously beating heart.  But why?  Surely he had not expected her to come out from Monte Carlo to meet him!