XIV

When she got near the park gate, she heard the click of the latch. He was there, then, in the darkness of the wood, and had seen her!

“You are good and early,” he said out of the dark. “Was everything all right?”

“Perfectly easy.”

He shut the gate quietly after her, and made a spot of light on the dark ground, showing the pallid flowers still standing there open in the night. They went on apart, in silence.

“Are you sure you didn’t hurt yourself this morning with that chair?” she asked.

“No, no!”

“When you had that pneumonia, what did it do to you?”

“Oh, nothing! it left my heart not so strong and the lungs not so elastic. But it always does that.”

524