I was shorter and I suppose a couple of years younger than he, but I had the improvised club in my pocket gripped ready, and I would have fought with him very cheerfully.  But he fell a step backward as I came toward him.

“Socialist, I presume?” he said, alert and quiet and with the faintest note of badinage.

“One of many.”

“We’re all socialists nowadays,” he remarked philosophically, “and I haven’t the faintest intention of disputing your right of way.”

“You’d better not,” I said.

“No!”

“No.”

He replaced his cigar, and there was a brief pause.  “Catching a train?” he threw out.

It seemed absurd not to answer.  “Yes,” I said shortly.

He said it was a pleasant evening for a walk.

I hovered for a moment and there was my path before me, and he stood aside.  There seemed nothing to do but go on.  “Good night,” said he, as that intention took effect.

I growled a surly good-night.

I felt like a bombshell of swearing that must presently burst with some violence as I went on my silent way.  He had so completely got the best of our encounter.

Section 7

There comes a memory, an odd intermixture of two entirely divergent things, that stands out with the intensest vividness.

As I went across the last open meadow, following the short cut to Checkshill station, I perceived I had two shadows.

The thing jumped into my mind and stopped its tumid flow for a moment.  I remember the intelligent detachment of my sudden interest.  I turned sharply, and stood looking at the moon and the great white comet, that the drift of the clouds had now rather suddenly unveiled.

The comet was perhaps twenty degrees from the moon.  What a wonderful thing it looked floating there, a greenish-white apparition in the dark blue deeps!  It looked brighter than the moon because it was smaller, but the shadow it cast, though clearer cut, was much fainter than the moon’s shadow. . .  I went on noting these facts, watching my two shadows precede me.

I am totally unable to account for the sequence of my thoughts on this occasion.  But suddenly, as if I had come on this new fact round a corner, the comet was out of my mind again, and I was face to face with an absolutely new idea.  I wonder sometimes if the two shadows I cast, one with a sort of feminine faintness with regard to the other and not quite so tall, may not have suggested the word or the thought of an assignation to my mind.  All that I have clear is that with the certitude of intuition I knew what it was that had brought the youth in evening dress outside the shrubbery.  Of course!  He had come to meet Nettie!

Once the mental process was started it took no time at all.  The day which had been full of perplexities for me, the mysterious invisible thing that had held Nettie and myself apart, the unaccountable strange something in her manner, was revealed and explained.