Then she followed boldly, on the calculation that he would have taken the visitor up and that the hall would be free.  The hall was free, and the electric light played over the gilded and lettered board that showed the names and numbers of the occupants of the different floors.  What she wanted looked straight at her—­Captain Everard was on the third.  It was as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they were, for the instant and the first time, face to face outside the cage.  Alas! they were face to face but a second or two:  she was whirled out on the wings of a panic fear that he might just then be entering or issuing.  This fear was indeed, in her shameless deflexions, never very far from her, and was mixed in the oddest way with depressions and disappointments.  It was dreadful, as she trembled by, to run the risk of looking to him as if she basely hung about; and yet it was dreadful to be obliged to pass only at such moments as put an encounter out of the question.

At the horrible hour of her first coming to Cocker’s he was always—­it was to be hoped—­snug in bed; and at the hour of her final departure he was of course—­she had such things all on her fingers’-ends—­dressing for dinner.  We may let it pass that if she couldn’t bring herself to hover till he was dressed, this was simply because such a process for such a person could only be terribly prolonged.  When she went in the middle of the day to her own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go straight, though it must be added that for a real certainty she would joyously have omitted the repast.  She had made up her mind as to there being on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting casually past at three o’clock in the morning.  That was the hour at which, if the ha’penny novels were not all wrong, he probably came home for the night.  She was therefore reduced to the vainest figuration of the miraculous meeting toward which a hundred impossibilities would have to conspire.  But if nothing was more impossible than the fact, nothing was more intense than the vision.  What may not, we can only moralise, take place in the quickened muffled perception of a young person with an ardent soul?  All our humble friend’s native distinction, her refinement of personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the objection of her vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow before her in some just discernible sign.  He did like her!

CHAPTER XIII