So I watched her as she saw, for the second time in her life, what I saw for the first time in mine--the father of the man he had been and was to be again, his acts and gestures varying with a thousand accidents of circumstance, but himself essentially and unchangeably the same. You may charge me if you will with laying claim to knowledge after the event, but there radiated from every particle of him his own yet-folded potentialities. His gentle mischief towards her was the germ of that masterful wit that had made the Barnacles of _The Vicarage of Bray_ skip at his pleasure. His good-humour and urbanity and willingness to talk while we sat oppressed and silent were, in little, the qualities that had bloomed in his mature work, _The Hands of Esau_. Only the fierce passion of _An Ape in Hell_ was to seek, and none could have said that it did not lurk there, inappropriate to the occasion, therefore uncalled on, but deep-slumbering under all. And if I was able to make a dim guess or two at these involutions, what of this woman to whom it was not guessing, but open knowledge? In her mind was a parallelism indeed! I had seen one trifle for myself that very morning--his sudden stop when Jennie had paused under the window of St Sauveur; but of just such bright threaded beads of memories her whole life, all of it that was worth anything to her, had been composed. Her unwavering love had been the string that had held all together. And not only did she sit there now telling, as it were, these beads over, to the last one drowned at the bottom of the pools of her deep eyes; she had them uniquely and desolately to herself. He, who had provided them, had no part whatever in them. She could no longer say "Do you remember this or that." He remembered only from the moment of his setting eyes on Jennie. As unconsciously as when he had stripped to the waist for her, as unknowingly as when he had swum before her, he now seared her in his very innocence and ignorance. A village church--Sussex fields and lanes--a day at Chalfont--another day somewhere else--and a week-end at my house ... oh, the jewels were quickly counted. Perhaps she had others of which I did not know. If so, they were the secret of the eyes that looked away past the elms, down on to the walking hats in the Fosse below. And he would grow up again, but she could only continue her life. In another twenty years he would be as old as she was now; but she, I myself ... only Jennie, only Jennie would be by his side on that distant day. At some still unknown fireside, in some unguessed house or garden, they would speak of "poor old Miss Oliphant, poor old Coverham," long since out of the way. Different generations, different generations! And--I cannot be sure of this, and I shall never know--but I do not think that by this time he, who had started the whole mystic thing, had the least recollection of anything whatever he had been and done.