Ahead of her, in a transverse alley, she was disagreeably surprised by the sight of Lilla Gates. There was no mistaking that tall lounging figure, though it was moving slowly away from her. Lilla at that hour in the Park? It seemed curious and improbable. Yet Lilla it was; and Mrs. Clephane’s conclusion was drawn immediately. “Who is she waiting for?” Whoever it was had not come; the perspective beyond Lilla was empty. After a moment she hastened her step, and vanished behind a clump of evergreens at the crossing of the paths. Kate did not linger to watch for her reappearance. The incident was too trifling to fix the attention; after all, what had one ever expected of Lilla but that she might be found loitering in unlikely places, in quest of objectionable people? There was nothing new in that--nor did Kate even regret not having a glimpse of the objectionable person. In her growing reassurance about Anne, Lilla’s affairs had lost whatever slight interest they once offered. She walked on--but her mood was altered. The sight of Lilla lingering in that deserted path had called up old associations. She remembered meetings of the same kind--but was it her own young figure she saw fading down those far-off perspectives? Well--if it were, let it go! She owned no kinship with that unhappy ghost. Serene, middle-aged, respected and respectable, she walked on again out of that vanishing past into the warm tangible present. And at any moment now she might meet Anne. She had turned down a wide walk leading to one of the Fifth Avenue entrances of the Park. One could see a long way ahead; there were people coming and going. Two women passed, with some noisy children racing before them, a milliner’s boy, whistling, his boxes slung over his shoulder, a paralytic pushing himself along in a wheeled chair; then, coming toward her from the direction of Fifth Avenue, a man who half-stopped, recognized her, and raised his hat. BOOK II. VIII. “Chris!” she said. She felt herself trembling all over; then, abruptly, mysteriously, and in the very act of uttering his name, she ceased to tremble, and it came flooding in on her with a shock of wonder that the worst was already over--that at last she was going to be free. “Well, well,” she heard him saying, in that round full voice which always became fuller and more melodious when it had any inner uncertainty to mask; and “If only,” she thought, “it doesn’t all come back when he laughs!” He laughed. “I’m so glad ... _glad_,” he reiterated, as if explaining; and with the laugh in her ears she still felt herself as lucidly, as incredibly remote from him. “Glad?” she echoed, a little less sure of her speech than of her thoughts, and remembering how sometimes the smile in his eyes used to break up her words into little meaningless splinters that she could never put together again till he was gone.