“You are overcome by the sun,” he said.  “Lie down for a moment,” and again he offered her a hand to help her to rise.  She shook her head but took his hand, enclosing it in both of hers with a sort of happy deliberation, and drew herself up by it, while her eyes, shining like dark surfaces of some glorious consciousness within, never left his face.  So she stood beside him with her head bowed, still dumb.  It was her supreme moment; life never again brought her anything like it.  It was not that she confessed so much as that she asserted, she made a glowing thing plain, cried out to him, still standing silent, the deep-lying meaning of the tangle of their lives.  She was shaken by a pure delight, as if she unclosed her hand to show him a strange jewel in her palm, hers and his for the looking.  The intensity of her consciousness swept round him and enclosed him, she knew this profoundly, and had no thought of the insulation he had in his robe.  The instant passed; he stood unmoved definitely enough, yet some vibration in it reached him, for there was surprise in his involuntary backward step.

“You must have thought me curiously rude,” he said, as if he felt about for an explanation, “but your letters were only given to me an hour ago.  We have all been in retreat, you know.”

“In retreat!” Hilda exclaimed.  “Ah, yes.  How foolish I have been!  In retreat,” she repeated softly, flicking a trace of dust from his sleeve.  “Of course.”

“It was held in St. Paul’s College,” Stephen went on, “by Father Neede.  Shall we sit down?  And of course at such times no communications reach us, no letters or papers.”

“No letters or papers,” Hilda said, looking at him softly, as it were, through the film of the words.  They sat down, he on the sofa, she on a chair very near it.  There was another placed at a more usual distance, but she seemed incapable of taking the step or two toward it, away from him.

Stephen gave himself to the grateful sense of her proximity.  He had come to sun himself again in the warmth of her fellowship; he was stirred by her emphasis of their separation and reunion.  “And what, please,” he asked, “have you been doing?  Account to me for the time.”

“While you have been praying and fasting?  Wondering what you were at, and waiting for you to finish.  Waiting,” she said, and clasped her knees with her intent look again, swaying a little to and fro in her content, as if that which she waited for had already come, full, and very desirable.

“Have you been reading?—­”

“Oh, I have been reading nothing!  You shall never go into retreat again,” she went on, with a sudden change of expression.  “It is well enough for you, but I am not good at fasting.  And I have an indulgence,” she added, unaware of her soft, bright audacity, “that will cover both our cases.”

His face uttered aloud his reflection that she was extravagant.  That it was a pity, but that what was not due to her profession might be ascribed to the simple, clear impulse of her temperament—­ that temperament which he had found to be a well of rare sincerity.