The Altar of the Dead | Page 8

a manner old friends--that this
negative quantity was somehow more than they could express. His
success, it was true, had been qualified by her quick escape, so that
there grew up in him an absurd desire to put it to some better test. Save
in so far as some other poor chance might help him, such a test could
be only to meet her afresh at church. Left to himself he would have
gone to church the very next afternoon, just for the curiosity of seeing
if he should find her there. But he wasn't left to himself, a fact he
discovered quite at the last, after he had virtually made up his mind to
go. The influence that kept him away really revealed to him how little
to himself his Dead EVER left him. He went only for THEM--for
nothing else in the world.
The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hated to connect
the place with anything but his offices or to give a glimpse of the

curiosity that had been on the point of moving him. It was absurd to
weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that
might with ease have been daily or hourly; yet the tangle got itself
woven. He was sorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy
spell had been broken and he had lost a familiar security. At the last,
however, he asked himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear
of this muddle about motives. After an interval neither longer nor
shorter than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that
he should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the
concert. This indifference didn't prevent his at once noting that for the
only time since he had first seen her she wasn't on the spot. He had now
no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but she didn't arrive, and
when he went away still missing her he was profanely and consentingly
sorry. If her absence made the tangle more intricate, that was all her
own doing. By the end of another year it was very intricate indeed; but
by that time he didn't in the least care, and it was only his cultivated
consciousness that had given him scruples. Three times in three months
he had gone to church without finding her, and he felt he hadn't needed
these occasions to show him his suspense had dropped. Yet it was,
incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacy that had
kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of course immediately
have recognised his description of her, whether she had been seen at
other hours. His delicacy had kept him from asking any question about
her at any time, and it was exactly the same virtue that had left him so
free to be decently civil to her at the concert.
This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him when she
finally met his eyes--it was after a fourth trial--to predetermine quite
fixedly his awaiting her retreat. He joined her in the street as soon as
she had moved, asking her if he might accompany her a certain distance.
With her placid permission he went as far as a house in the
neighbourhood at which she had business: she let him know it was not
where she lived. She lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt,
a person in connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of
humdrum duties and regular occupations. She wasn't, the mourning
niece, in her first youth, and her vanished freshness had left something
behind that, for Stransom, represented the proof it had been tragically
sacrificed. Whatever she gave him the assurance of she gave without

references. She might have been a divorced duchess--she might have
been an old maid who taught the harp.


CHAPTER V.

They fell at last into the way of walking together almost every time
they met, though for a long time still they never met but at church. He
couldn't ask her to come and see him, and as if she hadn't a proper place
to receive him she never invited her friend. As much as himself she
knew the world of London, but from an undiscussed instinct of privacy
they haunted the region not mapped on the social chart. On the return
she always made him leave her at the same corner. She looked with
him, as a pretext for a pause, at the depressed things in suburban
shop-fronts; and there was never a word he had said to her that she
hadn't beautifully understood. For long ages he never knew her name,
any more than