the streets of Coulton and of the companion who had used to join him at the top of the Park. Nor was it so much of a reminding—for, of course, she had been dwelling in the painful background of his mind at all times. It was a sudden leaping of her image into the vacant interest which his studies had been occupying, a weaker yielding to the thoughts which he had kept resolutely out of his busy days. And he did not think of her with pity, as he did of these others. The mood is likely to be over-expressed in any words: but she took her place beside his own conception of himself and companioned him among these shadows of men and women like an immortal walking with him in a futile and passing world.
He began to chat with her, in an imaginary conversation, at first rather sadly, but without any reference to the cause of his tragic manner, for he had the same instinct to shield her from his doubts as he had had to protect Frankie from the discovery that Santa Claus was a myth. She asked him about his studies, about Conroy, about the life at college; and her questions were as unexpected as the conversation which one carries on in dreams. He saw her downward smile, the eyelash on her cheek, the quick side glance which she raised to him, rather shyly because of their long separation; and he looked down to see whether she wore her rubbers in the snow, and, while he replied to her, he watched her little feet appearing and disappearing below the hem of her skirt. The pleasure which he took out of it all was a thing not to be described. On top of his lonely misery, it was
