SHE came back to the city in November, but in the last of the month again Vane persuaded her to go to Newport and spend a week when he could be there all the time. She had an old aunt there at whose house she visited; Vane had his permanent lodgings; and this was before the time when many people stayed there through the winter. Vane had urged her to let him meet her at the southern extremity of the island, where the long ledges of rock run out to the reef; but sometimes she would bid him walk thither with her, and would even seem to like to have the notice of the town. They had given up their reading by this time, and their small talk had long since ceased. Early in the autumn they had begun with the Vita Nuova; but even Dante's words had seemed weak to him, and after a few days the books had been thrown aside. She had not urged him to go on with them. Every day, rain or storm, this late week in autumn, they would skirt the cliffs, by the gardens with a few geraniums or pansies still drooping in the trim parterres, and go far out along the southern coves and beaches, where the full pulse of the Atlantic rolled in from the Indies. Vane had tried every day to win the final word; but all his passion had not done more than force her to seek refuge in silence. This last day she had opened her lips once or twice to speak, after a long pause, and then pressed them again together. Vane always walked a yard or two from her side, and looked at her fairly when he spoke. She would not sit down with him that day; so they went on, mile after mile, along a still, gray sea. The sky was cloudy, the waters had an oily look; and the waves were convex and smooth until they broke, creaming about the sharp rocks. Vane made another trial, just before they left the ocean to turn inland. She seemed to feel that she ought to speak, then, but yet could only look at him with her large blue eyes, the pupils slightly dilated. At last, just as she was leaving him, "Come to see me, in a month, in New York," she said. Vane went back that night and kept himself very busy. He heard little from Miss Thomas during the time except that she had not returned from Newport. She would never write to him since the June last past, though he had often begged her to do so. On the afternoon before Christmas Eve, at five o'clock, he called at her house. The room was just as he remembered it the year before--if anything, a little more shabby. She was standing alone as if she expected him. She was dressed in a gown that he remembered, and looked younger and more like her old self than she had seemed at Newport. She was smiling as he entered, but though the smile did not enter her eyes, they were not deep. She held something in her hand, which, as Vane approached, she extended to him. "I want to give you back your handkerchief," she said. "I have felt that I ought to for a long time. I wanted to do so at Newport, but I could not bring myself to do it then."