(Did I mention that during all the time I had known her we had only spent one other evening out of doors alone together? It had been more than four years before, and we had heard a nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common.)
I had not answered. To allow the memory of that other evening to repossess her had seemed the best answer to make. For though we pack our hearts daily with the stuff of life, only time shows us which is the tinsel we have coveted, and which the lump we have not known to be gold. More than four years had passed; presently those four years would have opened her eyes to differences too; and so I had waited....
And, if not yet discovered, at any rate sudden and troubling new questions had crowded into her eyes as I had watched. Another silence of many minutes, then:
"We've been such friends up to now," she had faltered, as much to the darkening evening as to myself.
"Need that mean 'No,' Evie?"...
"I don't know—it's so—strange—I never——"
I had drawn a little nearer.
"Never? Never once? You never once thought that perhaps——?"
Then once more had come the memories of that other evening, with the unhappiness of another's bringing, and the comfort of my own. Night had begun to creep under the trees, but the shadows but made zenith the purer. On such evenings lovers vie with one another in looking for the first star, but we were not lovers yet, and could see nothing save the ash, now become grey, and away to the north the faint yellow haze of the Bayswater Road. Evie's own figure had become dim until little of it had showed but the handkerchief in her lap, the narrow white stripe of her black and white blouse where her little black jacket parted, and, as at last she had turned, the motion of her eyes.
"You don't want an answer now, Jeff," she had said quickly, immediately dropping the eyes again.