Again her hand slid, as if of itself, back into its place. Again they walked on. The next thing that came to her was another ridiculous yet oddly precious trifle. She wore kid gloves; before, when she had danced with him in an old frock of oyster-grey, she had worn white ones; must she (she wondered) always wear gloves with him, as he always wore old overcoats? She longed to take one glove off; yet she--she, who had met Roy by the stile at night--for very bashfulness dared not. The circumstance struck her; how was that? Gifts of understanding for her he had: had he that gift too, the gift of her own bashfulness back again? Up went her spirit on wings.... Yes, it was that--or for a night at least she would have it so. As impossibilities are reconciled in a dream, so he seemed, by his mere towerlike presence, to resolve in one large atonement, her own life as it had been and the sweet and virginal and dear smiling thing that it might have been. In no less a miracle than that she seemed to herself to be walking. He could not only have kissed her; he could have had her first kiss. He could not only have turned, as he did turn, leaning against the pillar-box by the Equerries' entrance of the Palace, to look at her again, but he could have received in return--did receive in return--such a look as she knew he also could hardly have had the like of before. And it made no difference--as in a dream such a thing might make no difference--that he had a wife, she a son. Let him have his wife, she her son; she could find room for wives and sons too. To-morrow, perhaps, it would not be so; to-morrow might be like yesterday again; but to-night--to-night--oh, the first garden was not less trodden than these rainy streets, the Barracks, Gorringes', and Grosvenor Road! Her hand moving again on his sleeve was telling him even now, if he would but listen, that though man may not know that it is not good for him to be alone, woman knows it, and maybe still remembers it out of her knowledge of the place whence she came later than he. And he too understood now, for she was not so rapt but that she remembered that he asked her, somewhere between a sandbin and a street lamp, whether she was happy too, and that, looking up at him, she smilingly whispered: "Yes, now." And she was not so rapt but that she remembered telling him, flatly and with another happy and laughing and triumphant look: "You can't prevent it!" But she was so rapt that of much else that he and she said she had no very clear recollection. Words that seemed unforgettable when they came had eluded her almost in their own echo. But she knew that she gave him the liberty of herself with no more reserve than she had claimed that of him. She knew that because, later, but she did not know when, he muttered, in some street or other, she did not know where: "God bless your boy." Well, if she forgot things now, there would be many days to come in which she would remember them.