She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the quiet stairs and well up the street together. This also must have been in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly articulate, for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be, later on, a thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit of what just here for a longish minute passed between them was his taking in her thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed without pride or sound or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of the cage, the very shop~girl at large that she hugged the theory she wasn’t. Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could have come and gone and yet not disfigured the dear little intense crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the horrid notes of that kind of acquaintance. He had taken no liberty, as she would have so called it; and, through not having to betray the sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none. On the spot, nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that, if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked independence. This was one of the questions he was to leave her to deal with — the question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women. Could people of his sort do that without what people of her sort would call being “false to their love”? She had already a vision of how the true answer was that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter — didn’t count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what.

Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty corner of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one of the smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular word about it — they were talking so of other things — they crossed the street and went in and sat down on a bench. She had gathered by this time one magnificent hope about him — the hope he would say nothing vulgar. She knew thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something quite apart from any matter of his being “false.” Their bench was not far within; it was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight and the rumbling cabs and ‘buses. A strange emotion had come to her, and she felt indeed excitement within excitement; above all a conscious joy in testing him with chances he didn’t take. She had an intense desire he should know the type she really conformed to without her doing anything so low as tell him, and he had surely begun to know it from the moment he didn’t seize the opportunities into which a common man would promptly have blundered. These were on the mere awkward surface, and their relation was beautiful behind and below them. She had questioned so little on the way what they might be doing that as soon as they were seated she took straight hold of it. Her hours, her confinement, the many conditions of service in the post-office, had — with a glance at his own postal resources and alternatives — formed, up to this stage, the subject of their talk. “Well, here we are, and it may be right enough; but this isn’t the least, you know, where I was going.”

“You were going home?”

“Yes, and I was already rather late. I was going to my supper.”

“You haven’t had it?”

“No indeed!”

“Then you haven’t eaten —?”

He looked of a sudden so extravagantly concerned that she laughed out. “All day? Yes, we do feed once. But that was long ago. So I must presently say good-bye.”

“Oh deary me!” he exclaimed with an intonation so droll and yet a touch so light and a distress so marked — a confession of helplessness for such a case, in short, so unrelieved — that she at once felt sure she had made the great difference plain. He looked at her with the kindest eyes and still without saying what she had known he wouldn’t. She had known he wouldn’t say “Then sup with me!” but the proof of it made her feel as if she had feasted.

“I’m not ............