"I'm so sorry," I said, "I thought this was your way. I don't know that it's particularly mine--I was only taking a stroll--so if you don't mind I'll walk back with you." Thereupon we turned back into the Fields. It was this mutually made discovery that neither of us was pressed for time that brought simultaneously into our minds some slight self-consciousness that for the first time in our lives we should be thus killing an hour in one another's company. Her own embarrassment presently gave expression to this. "How nice," she said, after we had walked half the length of the central garden railings in silence, "to feel sometimes that you haven't got to talk if you don't want to!" The remark, commonplace as it was, gave me a new glimpse of her. I knew that she read a better class of novel than my Evie, and with the results you might suppose. I don't seriously believe that Evie's "scions of noble blood" and the rest of her novelette paraphernalia had any point of contact with real life for her, but Miss Windus carried over the triteness she got from her reading into her thought and speech. Therefore, since I myself, though no eloquent speaker, believe that tongues were made to talk with, I again laughed a little. "Yes," I replied, "provided always that you aren't silent merely because you've nothing to say." I think this penetration, such as it was, struck her with quite remarkable force; and, as the novels provided no reply to it, she was again silent for a time. We were approaching the corner of Great Turnstile again, but I don't think she noticed it. We turned down by Stone Buildings and began to complete the circuit of the Fields. "Mr Merridew said you were very clever," she remarked at last. "What _do_ you study all by yourself in the senior classroom, Mr Jeffries?" she asked, the quizzical little triangles of her eyes turned up to mine in the light of a lamp that hung like a beacon over the garden railings. She wore a plaid Inverness cape and a boat-shaped hat that night, I remember, and would doubtless have worn rubber heels had those articles been invented. Never woman made a slighter physical appeal to man than she. "I'm not quite sure myself yet," I replied, as truthfully as made no matter. "Part of it at any rate is human nature in business." "I love human nature," she said. I knew I had only to speak. In the light of the wrong I was about to do her I freely forgave her all her past pretences towards myself. All grapes had been sour to poor Kitty, and I didn't doubt she had made brave attempts, and still braver concealments of failure. Baboon or anybody else, there she was at his pleasure so her reproach be but taken away. For already I had decided that it might as well be now as later. "Yes," I answered, as if absently, and we walked on.