She flashed inquiry into his face, then let her glance wander vaguely off again. “Oh, I saw you well enough,” she confessed, with a curious intermingling of hesitation and boldness; “but at first I wasn’t going to pretend I did. In fact, I don’t in the least know why I did stop. Or, rather, I do know, but you don’t, and you never will. That is to say, I shan’t tell you!”
“Oh, but I do know,” he answered genially. “How should you imagine me so deficient in discernment? Only—only, I think I won’t tell either.”
She looked at him again with a kind of startled intentness, and parted her lips as if to speak. He fancied that he caught in this gaze the suggestion of a painful and humbled diffidence. But then she tossed her head with a saucy air and smiled archly. “What a tremendous secret we shall carry to our graves!” she laughed. “Tell me, do you sleep on the bridge? One hears such remarkable stories, you know, about the readers at the Museum.”
He regarded her with pleasure beaming in his eyes. “No, I go entirely without sleep,” he replied, with gravity, “and walk about the streets turning a single idea for ever in my mind; and every morning at daybreak—oh, this has gone on for years now—I come here to watch for the beautiful girl with the yellow hair who some time is to come up to me and remark, ‘It is a fine morning.’ A fortuneteller told me, ever so long ago, that this was what I must do, and I’ve never had a moment’s rest since.”
“You must be very tired,” she commented, “and a good deal mixed in your mind, too, especially since yellow hair has come so much into fashion. And did the fortune-teller mention what was to happen after the—the beautiful lady had really appeared?”
“Ah, that is another of my secrets!” he cried, delightedly.
They had begun to stroll together toward the clock-tower. The throng bustling heedlessly past with hurried steps gave them an added sense of detachment and companionship. They kept close together by the parapet, their shoulders touching now and again. When they reached the end of the bridge, and paused to look again upon the river prospect, their manner had taken on the ease of people who have known each other for a long time.
The tide was running out now with an exaggerated show of perturbed activity. The girl bent over, and stared at the hurrying current, sweeping along in swirling eddies under the arch, and sucking at the brown-grey masonry of the embankment wall as it passed. Her silence in this posture stretched out over minutes, and he respected it.
At last she had looked her fill and turned, and they resumed their walk. “I could never understand drowning,” she remarked, musingly; “it doesn’t appeal to me at all, somehow. They talk about its being pleasant after the first minute or so, but I don’t believe it. Do you?”
“There might possibly be some point about it—if one could choose the fluid,” he replied, achieving flippancy with an effort. “Like the Duke of Clarence, for example.”