For simple she undoubtedly was, not in the way of shallowness, but because her nature seemed at harmony with itself: uncomplex, natural, frank and open, and with an unconventional carelessness that did no evil for the reason that she thought and meant none. She could do things that must have made an ordinary worldly woman the centre of incessant talk and scandal. There was, indeed, an extraordinary innocence about her that perturbed the judgment, somewhat baffling it. Whereas with many women it might have roused the suspicion of being a pose, an affectation, with her, Tom felt, it was a genuine innocence, beyond words delightful and refreshing. And it arose, he soon discovered, from the fact that, being good and true herself, she thought everybody else was also good and true. This he realised before two days' intercourse had made it seem as if they had been together always and were made for one another. Something bigger and higher than he had ever felt before stirred in him for this woman, whom he thought of now invariably as Madame de Jaretzka, rather than as Lettice of his younger dream. If she woke something nobler in him that had slept, he did not label it as such: nor, if a portion of his younger dream was fulfilling itself before his eyes, in a finer set of terms, did he think it out and set it down in definite words. There was this intense and intimate familiarity between them both, but somehow he did not call it by these names. He just thought her wonderful—and longed for her. The reserve began to trouble him.…

'It's sweet,' she said, 'when real people come together—find each other.'

'Again,' he added. 'You left that out. For I've never forgotten—all these years.'

She laughed. 'Well, I'll tell you the truth,' she confessed frankly. 'I hadn't forgotten either; I often thought of you and wondered——'

'What I was like now?'

'What you were doing, where you were,' she said. 'I always knew what you were like. But I often wondered how far on you had got.'

'You had no news of me?'

'None. But I always believed you'd do something big in the world.'

Something in her voice or manner made it wholly natural for him to tell her of his boyhood love. He mentioned the Wave and wavy feeling, the nightmare too, but when he tried to go beyond that, something checked him; he felt a sudden shyness. It 'sounds so silly,' was his thought. 'But I always know a real person,' he said aloud, 'anybody who's going to be real in my life; they always arrive on a wave, as it were. My wavy feeling announces them.' And the interest with which she responded prevented his regretting having made his confession.

'It's an instinct, I think,' she agreed, 'and instincts are meant to be listened to. I've had something similar, though with me it's not a wave.' Her voice grew slower, she made a pause; when he looked up—her eyes were gazing across the lake as though in a moment of sudden absent-mindedness. . . . 'And what's yours?' he asked, wondering why his heart was beating as though something painful was to be disclosed.