There was nothing so to account but the fragments of Mrs. Headway’s conversation, the peculiarities of her accent, the sallies of her wit, the audacities of her fancy, the odd echoes of her past. Of course he knew she had had a past; she wasn’t a young girl, she was a widow—and widows were essentially the expression of an accomplished fact. He was not jealous of her antecedents, but he would have liked a little to piece them together, and it was here the difficulty occurred. The subject was illumined with fitful flashes, but never placed itself before him as a general picture. He asked her various questions, but her answers were so startling that, like sudden luminous points, they seemed to intensify the darkness round their edges. She had apparently spent her life in a remote province of a barbarous country, but it didn’t follow from this that she herself had been low. She had been a lily among thistles, and there was something romantic possibly in the interest taken by a man of his position in a woman of hers. It pleased Sir Arthur to believe he was romantic; that had been the case with several of his ancestors, who supplied a precedent without which he would scarce perhaps have ventured to trust himself. He was the victim of perplexities from which a single spark of direct perception would have saved him. He took everything in the literal sense; a grain of humour or of imagination would have saved him, but such things were never so far from him as when he had begun to stray helplessly in the realm of wonder. He sat there vaguely waiting for something to happen and not committing himself by rash declarations. If he was in love it was in his own way, reflectively, inexpressibly, obstinately. He was waiting for the formula which would justify his conduct and Mrs. Headway’s peculiarities. He hardly knew where it would come from; you might have thought from his manner that he would discover it in one of the elaborate _entreés_ that were served to the pair when she consented to dine with him at Bignon’s or the Café Anglais; or in one of the luxurious band-boxes that arrived from the Rue de la Paix and from which she often lifted the lid in the presence of her admirer. There were moments when he got weary of waiting in vain, and at these moments the arrival of her American friends—he often asked himself why she had so few—seemed to lift the mystery from his shoulders and give him a chance to rest. This apology for a plan she herself might yet scarce contribute to, since she couldn’t know how much ground it was expected to cover. She talked about her past because she thought it the best thing to do; she had a shrewd conviction that it was somehow better made use of and confessed to, even in a manner presented or paraded, than caused to stretch behind her as a mere nameless desert. She could at least a little irrigate and plant the waste. She had to have some geography, though the beautiful blank rose-coloured map-spaces