chill, clear sky of the November day.
A voice at her side aroused her before she realized that she was not alone. At the sound she turned guiltily, and found herself face to face with a man she had never seen. He stood quite near, hat in hand, surveying her with cool, steel-blue eyes. In that first instant, with a perception sharpened by her mental anguish, she became suddenly as familiar with every detail of his appearance as if they had been intimates for years. He was tall and slender, and unmistakably young; and, in singular contrast to his pallid complexion, his lips, under the thin mustache, were full and red, with a strange, sensual crookedness that was half a smile and half a sneer. There was about him a curious, compellant air of mastery and self-possession, as of one sure of himself, and accustomed to control; and his first words, under their veneer of polite solicitude, were, in their total lack of surprise or idle curiosity, significant of the trained man of the world, while the quaint, foreign flavour of the title by which he addressed her was equally suggestive of the cosmopolite.
"You are in distress, madame?"
Helen paused before replying. With the instinctive delicacy of her sex, she realized that in the approach of a stranger who had surprised her in a betrayal of extreme emotion there was something which she would do well to resent; and yet she was come to one of those crises which every woman knows; when the need of sympathy, even the most casual, was imperative – when, albeit at the sacrifice of conventionality, she was fain to seek support, to grasp a firm hand, to hear a friendly, though an unknown, voice. Pride, her stanch ally through all the bitter hours of her despair, had weakened at this the most crucial point, and, like a frightened child, she would have run for reassurance into the arms of the veriest passer-by.
"Perhaps," she answered presently. "But, believe me, the expression of my feeling was purely involuntary. I thought myself alone. There are, ordinarily, few passers by this road."
He had replaced his hat now, and was no longer looking at her, but down across the shelving slope of hillside, spiked with slender trees, as close-set as the bristles of a giant brush. When he spoke again, his tone had curiously assumed the existence of a relation between them, as if, instead of total strangers, they had been old acquaintances, come together at this spot, and exchanging impressions of the scene before them.
"Strange," he said slowly, "that you should be in distress, when Nature, which always seems to me the most sympathetic of companions, is wrapped in so great repose. In my dealings with humanity, I've frequently met with misunderstanding; but never, in the attitude of Nature, a lack of what I felt to be completest comprehension of my mood. She always seems to divine our difficulties, and to have some little helpful hint, some small parable, which, if we read it aright, will point out the solution of our problem, or at least serve to soothe the momentary pang. This little stream at our feet, for example: how it preaches the lesson that while we must meet with days that are cold, unsympathetic, drear, it's not only possible, but best, to preserve, under the ice in which adversity wraps our hearts, the life and laughter which friendlier suns have taught us! I wonder if that is not the secret of all human contentment – to resign oneself to the chilling touch of the wintry days of life, secure in the knowledge that summer will return, the compensation be made manifest, and the wrong turned to right."
The rebuff which was on Helen's lips an instant before was never spoken. It was one of those moments when the intuitive assertion of dignity and self-reliance lays down its arms before the need of comfort and companionship. She did not look at him, but in her silence there was that which encouraged him to continue.
"You don't resent my speaking to you in this way?" he asked. "After all, why should you? You are a bubble on this strange, erratic stream of life, and I another. Bubble does not ask bubble the reason of their meeting, at some predestined spot between source and sea. Instead, they touch, perhaps to drift apart again after a moment; perhaps, as one often sees them, to unite in one larger, better, brighter bubble than either had been before. Neither cares a tittle for its chance companion's previous history, or for what the other bubbles say. Curiosity as to another's past is the prerogative of small-spirited man, as is also the dread of adverse criticism. Now the commingling bubbles are one of Nature's little parables, and my conception of ideal sympathy."
His eyes were upon her now, and, strangely impelled, her own came round to meet them.
"I'm not wholly sure that I get your meaning," she said, feeling that he exacted a reply. "Is it that association and sympathy are merely the result of chance?"
"Chance is only a word that we use to express the workings of a force beyond our understanding." He stooped and picked up a little stone, weighed it momentarily in his palm, and then, reversing his hand, let it fall. "One would hardly be apt to call it chance," he added, "that, after leaving my hand, that pebble reached the ground. If we understood destiny as we understand gravitation, we should not say that our present meeting was due to chance, but rather that it was the logical outcome of a natural law."
There was a long pause, during which he glanced at her more than once, with the seemingly careless but actually keenly observant air of a skilled physician studying a nervous patient. She was a little frightened, she confessed to herself, as she gathered her wits, staring at the bit of river which was visible from where they stood, and the slopes beyond. For weeks she had been prey to an apathy which was only broken, at intervals, by an outburst of passionate revolt. Now, in some inexplicable fashion, the burden seemed to have slipped from her shoulders, and the feeling of depression was replaced by one of uplifting, of unreasonable exhilaration. The sensation was vaguely familiar to her, and, groping for a clue, she found its parallel in the preliminary action of ether, which she had taken a year or so before. Through the growing, not unpleasurable, dizziness which came upon her thus, the man's voice made its way.
"Let me try to explain myself more clearly," he was saying. "Something – God, or chance, or destiny, or whatever you choose to call it – led me around that last turn of the road at a moment when, if I'm not mistaken, a fellow being came to the snapping-point of self-control. I can't think our meeting without significance. I believe I was sent to help you. The question is, whether you're broad and generous and courageous enough to take for granted a formal introduction, and the gradual evolution of acquaintance into intimacy, up to the moment when you would naturally turn to me, as your most loyal friend, for sympathy. And I think you will do that."
Once more Helen looked at him. Her mind was curiously clouded, but the sensation gave her no uneasiness. Instead, she felt that she was smiling.
"I think you will do it," he repeated.
He was holding out his hand with the confidence of one who knows it will be accepted, and, after a moment, she laid her own within it. His fingers closed firmly on hers, and, of a sudden, the world drew in about her, graying, as under the touch of fog. Her last perception was of his eyes fixed full on hers with an expression of quiet amusement.
"I'm faint," she murmured, "I am – faint – "
When she came to herself, his eyes still held her.
"In the strange, unknowable book of Fate," he said, "it was written, from the beginning of time, that you and I should meet upon a dull hillside in late November, and – and that all that has been should be!"
Before she had time to answer, he had left her.
Briefly she stood, dizzy and perplexed, and then, after one great leap, her heart seemed to shudder and stand still. She was in the sordid little living-room of the Kingsbridge cottage, and outside the day was glooming into twilight!
Without power to move, she watched from the window the man who had just gone, pass down the path and through the gate, and, turning, wave a farewell, before he hurried away in the direction of the station. Then she was fully aroused by the entrance of the postman, and went slowly to meet him at the door. There was only one letter, but this was
