He was dressed today in a sort of shirt-length tunic, gold-brown, with a high, round collar, and loose silk trousers and sandals that were just cut-out leather soles held on with a couple of lengths of thong wound around up to his ankles; his feet, she could see, were another version of his hands, long and narrow and golden brown like the stuff of his tunic. He was carrying a string bag with three red apples in it and a loaf of Procea bread-how strange, she thought, that even in her agitation she should notice these details. She considered turning and walking rapidly away, pretending to have remembered something, but instead she kept going, though her knees were trembling so much she could hardly walk in a straight line. Will you get a grip, for God's sake! she told herself, but it was no good, she could feel the blood rising to her face, that alabaster-white face of hers that registered even the faintest of embarrassments with a show of pink. He had seen her-he had recognized her. She wondered, with crazy inconsequence, how old he was-as old as Mr. Plunkett, she guessed, but how differently he carried his age. Her steps led her on. What a lovely loose way he had of walking, leaning down a little way to one side and then the other at each long, loping stride he took, his shoulders dipping in rhythm with his steps and his head sliding backwards and forwards gently on its tall stalk of neck, like the head of some marvelous, exotic wading bird.

She was so flustered at the time that afterwards she could not remember exactly how he had got her to stop and talk. There was a raw wind, she recalled, swooping down in gusts from the sky and making the fallen sycamore leaves scuttle along the pavements like big, withered hands. He did not seem to mind the cold, even in his thin caftan and his practically bare feet. A purple-faced old fellow going by in a motorcar slowed down and goggled at them, the pale young woman and the dark man standing there together, she grinning like a lunatic and he as calm as if they had known each other forever.