“I know how that is,” I responded.  “At least I did know—­a few years ago.”

“Everything is a jumble with me,” he went on happily, in a confidential tone, “yet it’s a heavenly kind of jumble.  I can’t put anything into words.  I don’t think very well yet, though Keredec is trying to teach me.  My thoughts don’t run in order, and this that’s happened seems to make them wilder, queerer—­” He stopped short.

“What has happened?”

He paused in his sentry-go, facing me, and answered, in a low voice: 

“I’ve seen her again.”

“Yes, I know.”

“She told me you knew it,” he said, “—­that she had told you.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s not all,” he said, his voice rising a little.  “I saw her again the day after she told you—­”

“You did!” I murmured.

“Oh, I tell myself that it’s a dream,” he cried, “that it can’t be true.  For it has been every day since then!  That’s why I haven’t joined you in the woods.  I have been with her, walking with her, listening to her, looking at her—­always feeling that it must be unreal and that I must try not to wake up.  She has been so kind—­so wonderfully, beautifully kind to me!”

“She has met you?” I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed.

“She has let me meet her.  And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and then walked by the sea all afternoon.  She gave me the whole day—­the whole day!  You see”—­he began to pace again—­“you see I was right, and you were wrong.  She wasn’t offended—­she was glad—­that I couldn’t help speaking to her; she has said so.”

“Do you think,” I interrupted, “that she would wish you to tell me this?”

“Ah, she likes you!” he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take some satisfaction in it myself.  “What I wanted most to say to you,” he went on, “is this:  you remember you promised to tell me whatever you could learn about her—­and about her husband?”

“I remember.”

“It’s different now.  I don’t want you to,” he said.  “I want only to know what she tells me herself.  She has told me very little, but I know when the time comes she will tell me everything.  But I wouldn’t hasten it.  I wouldn’t have anything changed from just this!”

“You mean—­”

“I mean the way it is.  If I could hope to see her every day, to be in the woods with her, or down by the shore—­oh, I don’t want to know anything but that!”

“No doubt you have told her,” I ventured, “a good deal about yourself,” and was instantly ashamed of myself.  I suppose I spoke out of a sense of protest against Mrs. Harman’s strange lack of conventionality, against so charming a lady’s losing her head as completely as she seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling of jealousy for poor George—­possibly even out of a little feeling of the same sort on my own account.  But I couldn’t have said it except for the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed.