Mark bethought himself: “Well, I’m going to see a lady-----” She took the words from his mouth. “Of course you’re going to see a lady--every man in New York is. But Newton isn’t a lady, unfortunately for him, to-day; and Sunday afternoon in this place, in this weather, alone-----!” “Yes, isn’t it awful?”--he was quite drawn to her. “Oh, _you’ve_ got your lady!” “Yes, I’ve got my lady, thank goodness!” The fervour of which was his sincere tribute to the note he had had on Friday morning from Mrs. Ash, the only thing that had a little tempered his gloom. “Well then, feel for others. Fit him in. Tell him why!” “Why I’ve come back? I’m glad I _have_--since it was to see _you_!” Monteith made brave enough answer, promising to do what he could. He liked the pretty girl, with her straight attack and her free awkwardness--also with her difference from the others through something of a sense and a distinction given her by so clearly having Newton on her mind. Yet it was odd to him, and it showed the lapse of the years, that Winch--as he had known him of old--could _be_ to that degree on any one’s mind. III Outside in the intensity of the cold--it was a jump from the Tropics to the Pole--he felt afresh the force of what he had just been saying; that if it weren’t for the fact of Mrs. Ash’s good letter of welcome, despatched, characteristically, as soon as she had, like the faithful sufferer in Fiftieth Street, observed his name, in a newspaper, on one of the hotel-lists, he should verily, for want of a connection and an abutment, have scarce dared to face the void and the chill together, but have sneaked back into the jungle and there tried to lose himself. He made, as it was, the opposite effort, resolute to walk, though hovering now and then at vague crossways, radiations of roads to nothing, or taking cold counsel of the long but still sketchy vista, as it struck him, of the northward Avenue, bright and bleak, fresh and harsh, rich and evident somehow, a perspective like a page of florid modern platitudes. He didn’t quite know what he had expected for his return--not certainly serenades and deputations; but without Mrs. Ash his mail would have quite lacked geniality, and it was as if Phil Blood-good had gone off not only with so large a slice of his small _peculium_, but with all the broken bits of the past, the loose ends of old relationships, that he had supposed he might pick up again. Well, perhaps he should still pick up a few--by the sweat of his brow; no motion of their own at least, he by this time judged, would send them fluttering into his hand.