IN his room he assembled the battered clothing in which Rufus Hardinge had discovered him, preparatory to changing from his present more elaborate garb, but a sudden realization of the triviality of that course, born of the memory of Annot's broad disposition, halted him midway. Making a hasty bundle of his personal belongings he descended from the tower room. Through an open door he could see the still, white face of the biologist looming from a pillow, and the trim form of a nurse.

Thomas Huxley lay somnolently on the porch, beside Annot's coffee-colored wicker chair and a yellow paper book which bore a title in French. He paused on the street, gazing back, and recalled his first view of the four-square, ugly house in its coat of mustard-colored paint, the grey, dripping cupids of the fountain, the unknown girl with yellow silk stockings. Already he seemed to have crossed the gulf which divided it all from the present: its significance faded, its solidity dissolved, dropped behind, like a scene viewed from a car window. He turned, obsessed by the old, familiar impatience to hurry forward, the feeling that all time, all energy, all plans and thoughts, were vain that did not lead directly to——

A sudden and unaccountable sensation of cold swept over him, a profound emotion stirring in response to an obscure, a hidden cause. Then, with a rush, returned the feeling of Eliza's nearness: he heard her, the little, indefinable noises of her moving; he felt the unmistakable thrill which she alone brought. There was a vivid sense of her hand hovering above his shoulder; her fingers must descend, rest warmly.... God! how did she get here. He whirled about... nothing against the low stone-wall that bounded a sleepy garden, nothing in the paved perspective of the sunny street! He stood shaken, half terrified, miserable. He had never felt her nearness so poignantly; her distant potency had never before so mocked his hungering nerves.

Then, with the cold chilling him like a breath from an icy vault, he heard her, beyond all question, beyond all doubt:

“Anthony!” she called. “Anthony!” From somewhere ahead of him her tones sounded thin and clear; they seemed to reach him dropping from a window, lingering, neither grave nor gay, but tenderly secure, upon his hearing. He broke into a clattering run over the bricks of the unremarkable street, but soon slowed awkwardly into a walk, jeering at his fancy, his laboring heart, his mad credulity. And then, drifting across his bewildered senses, came the illusive, the penetrating, the remembered odor of lilacs, like a whisper, a promise, a magic caress.

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