Who could tell?
I rose once more.
It could serve no good purpose to linger until night by the banks of the river.
I had left the house, feeling the impulse which drives us, in certain excited conditions of the mind, to take refuge in movement and change.
The remedy had failed; my mind was as strangely disturbed as ever.
My wisest course would be to go home, and keep my good mother company over her favorite game of piquet.
I turned to take the road back, and stopped, struck by the tranquil beauty of the last faint light in the western sky, shining behind the black line formed by the parapet of the bridge.
In the grand gathering of the night shadows, in the deep stillness of the dying day, I stood alone and watched the sinking light.
As I looked, there came a change over the scene.
Suddenly and softly a living figure glided into view on the bridge.
It passed behind the black line of the parapet, in the last long rays of the western light.
It crossed the bridge.
It paused, and crossed back again half-way.
Then it stopped.
The minutes passed, and there the figure stood, a motionless black object, behind the black parapet of the bridge.
I advanced a little, moving near enough to obtain a closer view of the dress in which the figure was attired.
The dress showed me that the solitary stranger was a woman.
She did not notice me in the shadow which the trees cast on the bank.
She stood with her arms folded in her cloak, looking down at the darkening river.
Why was she waiting there at the close of evening alone?
As the question occurred to me, I saw her head move.
She looked along the bridge, first on one side of her, then on the other.
Was she waiting for some person who was to meet her?
Or was she suspicious of observation, and anxious to make sure that she was alone?
A sudden doubt of her purpose in seeking that solitary place, a sudden distrust of the lonely bridge and the swift-flowing river, set my heart beating quickly and roused me to instant action.
I hurried up the rising ground which led from the river-bank to the bridge, determined on speaking to her while the opportunity was still mine.
She neither saw nor heard me until I was close to her.
I approached with an irrepressible feeling of agitation; not knowing how she might receive me when I spoke to her.
The moment she turned and faced me, my composure came back.
It was as if, expecting to see a stranger, I had unexpectedly encountered a friend.
And yet she was a stranger.
I had never before looked on that grave and noble face, on that grand figure whose exquisite grace and symmetry even her long cloak could not wholly hide.
She was not, perhaps, a strictly beautiful woman.
There were defects in her which were sufficiently marked to show themselves in the fading light.
Her hair, for example, seen under the large garden hat that she wore, looked almost as short as the hair of a man; and the color of it was of that dull, lusterless brown hue which is so commonly seen in English women of the ordinary type.
Still, in spite of these drawbacks, there was a latent charm in her expression, there was an inbred fascination in her manner, which instantly found its way to my sympathies and its hold on my admiration.
She won me in the moment when I first looked at her.
"May I inquire if you have lost your way?" I asked.
Her eyes rested on my face with a strange look of inquiry in them.
She did not appear to be surprised or confused at my venturing to address her.
"I know this part of the country well," I went on.
"Can I be of any use to you?"
She still looked at me with steady, inquiring eyes.
For a moment, stranger as I was, my face seemed to trouble her as if it had been a face that she had seen and forgotten again.
If she really had this idea, she at once dismissed it with a little toss of her head, and looked away at the river as if she felt no further interest in me.
"Thank you.
I have not lost my way.
I am accustomed to walking alone.
Good-evening."
She spoke coldly, but courteously.