As it was one o'clock, he took his seat in the luncheon-car, making sure in advance that she wasn't there. He had come to the conclusion by this time that she was not on the train at all—that she hadn't been on the steamer. He did not, however, regret his precautions, because—well, because the sense of her proximity had made him feel as he had felt in the days—fourteen years ago now—when the very streets of the city in which she lived were hallowed ground. He had supposed that emotion dead. Probably it was dead. It must be dead. It was merely that, owing to the constraint of the voyage, his nerves were unstrung, inducing the frame of mind in which people see ghosts. Yes, that was it; he had been seeing ghosts. It was not a living thing, this renewed yearning for a sight of her. It was only the reflex of something past. It could be explained psychologically. It was the sort of evanescent sentiment inspired by old songs, or by the scent of faded flowers, reviving old joys tenderly, perhaps poignantly, but fleetingly, insubstantially, and only as the wraiths of what they were. Yes, that was it, he repeated to himself as he lunched. It was nothing to be afraid of, nothing incongruous with the fact that he had left a wife and child in New York. It was not an emotion; it was only the echo, the shadow, the memory of an emotion, gone before it could be seized.
And then, suddenly, they were face to face. He was on his way from the luncheon-car to the compartment he shared with two or three men at the other end of the train. She was standing in the corridor, looking out at the vaporous English landscape. Through the mists overlying the flat fields and distant parks trees loomed weirdly, the elms and beeches in full leaf, the oaks just tinged with green. Cottony white clouds drifted overhead; the sun was dimly visible. Now and then a line of hedge was white, or pink and white, with the bursting may.
He didn't recognize the lady who barred his way along the narrow passage. As she stood with one arm on the brass rail that crossed the window he could see an ungloved hand; but it might have been any hand. She wore a long brown coat, rather shapeless, reaching to the hem of her dress, while a large hat, about which a green veil looped and drooped irregularly, entirely concealing the head, helped to make her, as he stood waiting for her to move, a mere feminine figure without personality.
It was the sense that some one desired to pass that caused her to turn slightly, glancing up at him sidewise. Even so, he couldn't see all of her face—not much more than the forehead and the eyes. But the eyes seemed to come alive as he looked down into them, like sapphires under slowly growing light. When she turned, her movements had the deliberation of bewilderment. She might have been just wakened in a place she didn't know.
"Chip!" There was another half-minute of incredulous gazing before she said anything more. "What are you doing here?"
He felt the necessity of explaining his presence. "I was on the boat. I didn't know—"
"That I was on it, too?"
"I—I did know that," he stammered, "after we sailed. Not before. It was the name in the list—"
"But I never saw you. There weren't many passengers. I was always on deck."
Her distress betrayed itself in the trembling of her voice, in the shifting of her color, and in the beating of the ungloved hand upon the gloved one.