girls married at eighteen, or never. At twenty-one they were old maids. … He was waiting for some sign. Her limbs were powerless. With an immense effort she stretched forth an enormous arm and with a hand frightful in its size and clumsiness, tapped him on the shoulder. It was as if she had knocked him down, the blow she had given resounding through the world. He bent to catch at her retreating hand with the attitude of carrying it to his lips, but she was away down the room, her breath caught by a little gurgle of unknown laughter.
He was at the end of the street in the evening, standing bright in the golden light with a rose in his hand. For a swift moment, coming down the shaded street towards the open light she denied him, and the rose. He had bought a rose from some flower-woman’s basket, an appropriate act suggested by his thoughts. But his silent, most surrendered, most childlike gesture of offering, his man’s eyes grave upon the rose for her, beneath uplifted childlike plaintive brows, went to her heart, and with the passing of the flower into her hand, the gold of the sunlight, the magic shifting gleam that had lain always day and night, yearlong in tranquil moments upon every visible and imagined thing, came at last into her very hold. It had been love then, all along. Love was the secret of things.
They wandered silently, apart, along the golden-gleaming street. She listened, amidst the far-off sounds about them, to the hush of the great space in which they walked, where voices, breaking silently in from the talk of the world, spoke for her, bringing out, to grow and expand in the sunlight, the thoughts that lay in her heart. They had passed the park, forgetting it, and were enclosed in the dust-strewn narrowness of the Euston Road. But the dust grains were golden, and her downcast eyes saw everywhere, if she should raise them, the gleam of roses flowering on the air, and when, their way coming too soon towards its familiar end, they turned, with slow feet, down a little alley, dark with voices, the dingy house-fronts gleamed golden about her, the narrow strip of sky