Only this evening, about the small, sensitive mouth there seemed to
be hovering just the faintest suggestion of a timid smile. And this
time she lingered with him past Queen's Crescent and the Malden
Road, till he turned into Carlton Street. It was dark in the
passage, and he had to grope his way up the stairs, but with his
hand on the door of the bed-sitting room on the third floor he felt
less afraid of the solitude that would rise to meet him.
All day long in the dingy back office in Abingdon Street,
Westminster, where from ten to six each day he sat copying briefs
and petitions, he thought over what he would say to her; tactful
beginnings by means of which he would slide into conversation with
her. Up Portland Place he would rehearse them to himself. But at
Cambridge Gate, when the little fawn gloves came in view, the words
would run away, to join him again maybe at the gate into the Chester
Road, leaving him meanwhile to pass her with stiff, hurried steps
and eyes fixed straight in front of him. And so it might have
continued, but that one evening she was no longer at her usual seat.
A crowd of noisy children swarmed over it, and suddenly it seemed to
him as if the trees and flowers had all turned drab. A terror
gnawed at his heart, and he hurried on, more for the need of
movement than with any definite object.
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