“My ten years’ training with MacPherson proved invaluable to me now, and I can say with pride that neither by direct nor indirect means did I seek to extract any information from Ruth. Indeed, I was content to observe her as she sat by me in the cab, no longer the girl I remembered, but a woman of ripe beauty, and yet in her confused manner there was a remnant of girlishness, in her lowered eyes, and her tremulous lips. I saw that she sat there full of suppressed emotion, buoyed up by some intense determination which carried her over her shyness and confusion as a barque carries its passenger over high waves. I was too bewildered, too numb with joy, to wonder much at the cause of her journey. “At Charing Cross she produced the return half of her third-class ticket from her little purse, refusing to let me pay the excess fare which would allow us to travel first. I think she was afraid of being shut alone with me into a first-class carriage, knowing that in the humbler compartment she could reckon on the security of company. So we sat on the hard wooden benches, opposite one another, rocking and swaying with the train, and trying to shrink away in our respective corners from the contact of the fruit-pickers who crowded us unpleasantly: Ruth sat staring out over the fields of Kent, her hands in their neat gray cotton gloves lying on her lap, and the tired roses drooping listlessly between her fingers; she looked a little pale, a little thin, but that subtle warmth of her personality was there as of old, whether it lay, as I never could decide, in the glow under her skin or in the tender curves of her features. She looked up to catch me gazing at her, and we both turned to the landscape to hide our confusion. “Ah! I could look out over that flying landscape now, with no need to pull down the window-blinds, and Penshurst station, when we reached it, was no longer a pang, but a rejoicing. The train stopped, I struggled with the door, we jumped out, the train curved away again on its journey, and we stood side by side alone on the platform. “It was then about five o’clock of a perfect August day. Little white clouds stretched in a broken bank along the sky. Dorothy Perkins bloomed in masses on the palings of the wayside station. The railway seemed foreign to the country, the English country which lay there immovable, regardless of trains that hurried restless mankind to and fro, between London and the sea. “‘Let us go,’ I said to Ruth. “We set out walking across the fields, infinitely green and tender to my eyes, accustomed to the brown stoniness of Ephesus. We walked in silence, but I, for one, walked happy in the present, and feeling the aridity of my being soaked and permeated with repose and beauty. Ruth took off her jacket, which I carried for her, walking cool and slender in a white muslin shirt. In this soft garment she looked eighteen, as I remembered her.