So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning walks to the historic bridge; careful—after she had once passed him, and their eyes had met—never so much as to turn her head, to see if he were following.
And yet she knew—as well in those first days as she knew now—that every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by.
And she had known, too—how could she not know?—that this mute signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day by day she put off this event; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she moved, to wish to destroy it, either for better or for worse.
If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her; all would have been different.
Then she would have taken some desperate step—some step that would have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all, ready as none else could be ready, to cry with a great cry—“Lord, behold thine hand-maid; do unto her according to Thy will!” But she had known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast.
And in answer she had given herself up to him; given herself, she thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of delicious dreaming, she gave herself up to him now.
She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never—never for a moment—in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question of any possible future with him. In the trance-like hours wherein she had brooded so tenderly over the form and face of her nameless lover, she always pictured him as standing waiting for her, a tall, bowed, foreign-looking figure, clothed in the long weather-stained Inverness—the very texture of which she seemed to know the touch of—by that corner curb-stone where the flower-shop was.
Just in that manner, with just that air of ardent expectation, he might be found standing, she had felt, through unnumbered days of enchantment, and she passing by, in silence, with the same expectant thrill.
Such a love draught, not drained, not feverishly drunk of, but sweet in her mouth with the taste of a mystic consecration, seemed still, even now that she had him there beside her, to hold the secret, amid this warm breath of London’s first lilacs, of a triumphant Present, wherein both Past and Future were abolished.