It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the writer.  
She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some quality which he found repellent even in her attraction. She bore a well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place he had was let, and they entertained but little. Terence had known the latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely. He was a man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered, provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having married for love—as he termed it—instead of putting up his peerage to the bidding of the States.
 
Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.
 
She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived. She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their consequence.
 
Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like seed upon a rock. To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance, such detachment appeared incredible.
 
He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the name in London. A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment. Men looked to that.
 
But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing. If corruption had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a seeing. Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.
 
Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and added pity. She had it not at all.
 
He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes. Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.
 
He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by chance.
 
Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.
 
They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking them.
 
Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had taken a summer house.
 
He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in the end, went.
 
He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he should see little of his hostess.
 
It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess.
 
They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn.
 
He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul.
 
He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived.
 
Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.
 
"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.
 
"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?"
 
He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were.
 
He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.
 
If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.
 
But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that those hopes were becoming centred on himself.
 
What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?
 
Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion, discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.
 
Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape. She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself among the swine.
 
The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests, the same dissipations.
 
She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their tolerance of men's presumptions.
 
Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them refreshing; then she drew him into speech.
 
He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence, an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.
 
Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.
 
Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.
 
"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"
 
He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.
 
She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.
 
"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever helped me to understand."
 
He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving is never at an end.
 
So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness in the mellow silent days.
 
Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they m............