Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the way of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory as to why she remained in the city.  She had told him that the gardens were an excuse.  She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to decide some momentous question.  Marriage?  He found this too agitating to dwell upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have known; and it was perhaps natural, in view of her attitude, that he could only think of such a decision on her part as surrender.

That he had caught and held her attention, although by no conscious effort of his own, was clear to him.  But had he not merely arrested her?  Would she not presently disappear, leaving only in his life the scarlet thread which she had woven into it for all time?  Would he not fail to change, permanently, the texture of hers?

Such were his hopes and fears concerning her, and they were mingled inextricably with other hopes and fears which had to do with the great venture of his life.  He dwelt in a realm of paradoxes, discovered that exaltation was not incompatible with anxiety and dread.  He had no thought of wavering; he had achieved to an extent he would not have believed possible the sense of consecration which brings with it indifference to personal fortunes, and the revelation of the inner world, and yet he shrank from the wounds he was about to receive—­and give.  Outwardly controlled, he lived in the state of intense excitement of the leader waiting for the time to charge.

II

The moment was at hand.  September had waned, the nights were cooling, his parishioners were returning from the East.  One of these was Eleanor Goodrich, whom he met on a corner, tanned and revived from her long summer in Massachusetts.  She had inherited the kindly shrewdness of glance characteristic of gentlefolk, the glance that seeks to penetrate externals in its concern for the well-being of those whom it scrutinizes.  And he was subtly aware, though she greeted him cordially, that she felt a change in him without being able to account for it.

“I hear you have been here all summer,” she said reproachfully.  “Mother and father and all of us were much disappointed that you did not come to us on the Cape.”

“I should have come, if it had been possible,” he replied.  “It seems to have done you a world of good.”

“Oh, I!” She seemed slightly embarrassed, puzzled, and did not look at him.  “I am burned as disgracefully as Evelyn.  Phil came on for a month.

“He tells me he hasn’t seen you, but that isn’t surprising, for he hasn’t been to church since June—­and he’s a vestryman now, too.”

She was in mourning for her father-in-law, who had died in the spring.  Phil Goodrich had taken his place.  Eleanor found the conversation, somehow, drifting out of her control.  It was not at all what she would have desired to say.  Her colour heightened.