It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again,and on that occasion--the only one of all the series on which hindrance had been so utter--no communication with him proved possible.She had made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day:a patch of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the sanded floor and also,higher up,quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups.Work was slack and the place in general empty;the town,as they said in the cage,had not waked up,and the feeling of the day likened itself to something than in happier conditions she would have thought of romantically as Saint Martin's summer.The counter-clerk had gone to his dinner;she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs,in the midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the shop a minute and that Mr.Buckton had already seized him.
He had as usual half a dozen telegrams;and when he saw that she saw him and their eyes met he gave,on bowing to her,an exaggerated laugh in which she read a new consciousness.It was a confession of awkwardness;it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought better to have kept his head,ought to have been clever enough to wait,on some pretext,till he should have found her free.Mr.Buckton was a long time with him,and her attention was soon demanded by other visitors;so that nothing passed between them but the fulness of their silence.The look she took from him was his greeting,and the other one a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out.The only token they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish that since they couldn't attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing at all.This was her intense preference;she could be as still and cold as any one when that was the sole solution.
Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants struck her as marking a step:they were built so--just in the mere flash--on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she would do for him.The "anything,anything"she had uttered in the Park went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china that interposed.It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse:their former little postal make-believes,the intense implications of questions and answers and change,had become in the light of the personal fact,of their having had their moment,a possibility comparatively poor.It was as if they had met for all time--it exerted on their being in presence again an influence so prodigious.When she watched herself,in the memory of that night,walk away from him as if she were making an end,she found something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait.Hadn't she precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?
It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation,after he had gone,remained with her;a sense that presently became one with a still sharper hatred of Mr.Buckton,who,on her friend's withdrawal,had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her the other work.She knew indeed she should have a chance to see them,when she would,on file;and she was divided,as the day went on,between the two impressions of all that was lost and all that was re-asserted.What beset her above all,and as she had almost never known it before,was the desire to bound straight out,to overtake the autumn afternoon before it passed away for ever and hurry off to the Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench.It became for an hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit and wait for her.She could almost hear him,through the tick of the sounder,scatter with his stick,in his impatience,the fallen leaves of October.Why should such a vision seize her at this particular moment with such a shake?There was a time--from four to five--when she could have cried with happiness and rage.
Business quickened,it seemed,toward five,as if the town did wake up;she had therefore more to do,and she went through it with little sharp stampings and jerkings:she made the crisp postal-orders fairly snap while she breathed to herself "It's the last day--the last day!"The last day of what?She couldn't have told.
