THE SENSE OF THE PAST
something in her own intelligence that at sight and sound of him she slowly got up from before her work, with never a hint of interruption or confusion, and smiled across at him as if knowing all about him. She kept in this movement her arm still aloft—she might have been just balancing herself or wishing not to loosen her stitch; he was to remember afterwards how the crook of her little finger, in the raised hand, caught his eye at the distance, and how this helped him in a manner at once to take in that the arm itself, its sleeve shortened to very near the shoulder, was of the most beautiful rounded shape. That light of her knowing all about him doubtless helped to flood his own mind with the assurance immediately needed: he felt at this stage, in the most wonderful way, that things came to him, everything a right carriage required for the closer personal relation, in the very nick of being wanted, and wore thus, even under the gasp of a slight danger escaped, a certain charm and cheer of suddenness, That he was to make love, by every propriety, to Molly Midmore, and that he had in fact reached his goal on the very wings of that intention, this foretaste as of something rare had for days and days past hung about him like the scent of a flower persisting in life; but the sweetness of his going straight up to her with an offered embrace hadn't really been disclosed till her recognition, as we have said, breathed upon it with
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