What determined the speech that startled him in the
course of their encounter scarcely matters, being
probably but some words spoken by himself quite without
intention—spoken as they lingered and slowly
moved together after their renewal of acquaintance.
He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before
to the house at which she was staying; the party of
visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and
thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that
he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to
luncheon. There had been after luncheon much
dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive,
a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic
features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the
arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great
rooms were so numerous that guests could wander at
their will, hang back from the principal group and
in cases where they took such matters with the last
seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations
and measurements. There were persons to be observed,
singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way
corners with their hands on their knees and their
heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an excited
sense of smell. When they were two they either
mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences
of even deeper import, so that there were aspects
of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the
air of the “look round,” previous to a
sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches,
as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream
of acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be
wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among
such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the
presence of those who knew too much and by that of
those who knew nothing. The great rooms caused
so much poetry and history to press upon him that
he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper
relation with them, though this impulse was not, as
happened, like the gloating of some of his companions,
to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing
a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough
in a direction that was not to have been calculated.
It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon,
to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face,
a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat
much separated at a very long table, had begun merely
by troubling him rather pleasantly. It affected
him as the sequel of something of which he had lost
the beginning. He knew it, and for the time
quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn’t
know what it continued, which was an interest or an
amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware—yet
without a direct sign from her—that the
young woman herself hadn’t lost the thread.
She hadn’t lost it, but she wouldn’t
give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth
of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but
