Still laughing, I shut the door behind me and stepped out into the corridor. A young woman was hurrying past with a thick bundle of papers in her hand, humming softly as she went. Startled by my sudden emergence, she turned and looked at me. As though with fear, my heart gave a sudden thump, then seemed to stop for a moment altogether, seemed to drop down within me. “Barbara!” At the sound of the name she halted and looked at me with that steady unwavering gaze between the narrowed eyelids that I knew so well. A little frown appeared on her forehead; puzzled, she pursed her lips. Then all at once her face brightened, she laughed; the light in the dark eyes joyously quivered and danced. “Why, it’s Francis Chelifer,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know you for the first minute. You’ve changed.” “You haven’t,” I said. “You’re just the same.” She said nothing, but smiled, close-lipped, and from between her lashes looked at me as though from an ambush. In her young maturity she was more beautiful than ever. Whether I was glad or sorry to see her again, I hardly know. But I do know that I was moved, profoundly; I was shaken and troubled out of whatever equanimity I possessed. That memory of a kind of symbolic loveliness for which and by which I had been living all these years was now reincarnated and stood before me, no longer a symbol, but an individual; it was enough to make one feel afraid. “I thought you were in South Africa,” I went on. “Which is almost the same as saying I thought you didn’t exist.” “I came home a year ago.” “And you’ve been working here ever since?” Barbara nodded. “And you’re working in Bolo House too?” she asked. “For the last six months.” “Well I never! And to think we never met before! But how small the world is—how absurdly small.” We met for luncheon. “Did you get my letter?” I summoned up courage to ask her over the coffee. Barbara nodded. “It was months and months on its way,” she said; and I did not know whether she made the remark deliberately, in order to stave off for a moment the inevitable discussion of the letter, or if she made it quite spontaneously and without afterthought, because she found it interesting that the letter should have been so long on its way. “It went to South Africa and back again,” she explained. “Did you read it?” “Of course.” “Did you understand what I meant?” As I asked the question I wished that I had kept silence. I was afraid of what the answer might be. She nodded and said nothing, looking at me mysteriously, as though she had a secret and profound comprehension of everything. “It was something almost inexpressible,” I said. Her look encouraged me to go on. “Something so deep and so vast that there were no words to describe it. You understood? You really understood?” Barbara was silent for some time. Then with a little sigh she said: “Men are always silly about me. I don’t know why.”