"I wish motors had never been invented," he told himself.
All the same, when the hour-glass of time had let through the last grain of the space of their separation, and a pale girl withdrew her eyes from the speck of a boat growing smaller and smaller on a sea that sparkled so brilliantly that you could hardly look at it, and almost listlessly turned to walk back alone to her hotel, she was confronted with a very pale young man standing beside a very new motor-car.
"You!" she said, and, as once before, the blood rushed to her face, and his to his, answering.
This was the moment for which he had lived for weeks—and they shook hands like strangers! She was grave and cold. What would her first words be?
"But I said Thursday," she said.
He looked like a criminal detected in a larceny.
"I said Tuesday," he told her. "Do you mind?"
In his anticipations of this moment he had always counted on a mutual wave of gladness in their reunion, in which all doubts should be resolved and all explanations be easy. Now, he himself felt awkward as a school-boy. And he noted in her a quite inexplicable restraint and embarrassment, although she was certainly saying that she did not mind, and that it did not matter at all.
"Where were you going?" he asked, mechanically, just for something to say as they stood there by the motor, jostled by all the people who had been seeing other people off.
"To my hotel, to pack and to write to you, as I said I would."