At the corner of
Green Park, he came face to face with the woman who for the last
few months had scarcely been out of his thoughts. Even in that
first moment he realised to his pain that she would have avoided
him if she could. They met, however, where the path narrowed,
and he left her no chance to avoid him. That curious impulse of
conventionality which opens a conversation always with cut and
dried banalities, saved them perhaps from a certain amount of
embarrassment. Without any conscious suggestion, they found
themselves walking side by side.
"I have been wanting to see you very much indeed," he said. "I
even went so far as to wonder whether I dared call."
"Why should you?" she asked. "Our acquaintance began and ended
in tragedy. There is scarcely any purpose in carrying it
further."
He looked at her for a moment before replying. She was wearing
black, but scarcely the black of a woman who sorrows. She was
still frigidly beautiful, redolent, in all the details of her
toilette, of that almost negative perfection which he had learnt
to expect from her. She suggested to him still that same sense
of aloofness from the actualities of life.
"I prefer not to believe that it is ended," he protested. "Have
you so many friends that you have no room for one who has never
consciously done you any harm?"
She looked at him with some faint curiosity in her immobile
features.
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