“Well, I’ve been here, off and on, almost a month.  It’s an interesting place.  There’s a good deal of the old literary quality left.”

“And you enjoy that!  I saw”—­she added this with a little unnecessary flush—­“your poem in the paper you lent papa.”

“I suppose I ought to have kept that back.  But I couldn’t.”  He laughed, and she said: 

“You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place.”

“It isn’t lying about loose, exactly.”  Even in the serious and perplexing situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace conceptions of it.  They had their value with him as those of a more fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater world.  At the same time he believed that she was now interposing them between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return to the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad.  He looked at her ladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate.  Perhaps there had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination.  He must leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing enough to speak of what had happened since:  of coming on to Wurzburg with the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose’s collapse, and of his mother’s flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was so fortunately going to Holland, too.  He on his side told her of going to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strange they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his hopes.  With a lover’s indefinite power of blinding himself to what is before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him, more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for her to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in the little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always the only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.