Chapter 25

XXV.

Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others,
Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as
much as it sustained him.

The day, according to any current valuation, had
been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as
touched Madame Olenska's hand with his lips, or
extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther
opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with
unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from
the object of his passion, he felt himself almost
humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance
she had held between their loyalty to others and their
honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet
tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her
tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally
from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender
awe, now the danger was over, and made him
thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of
playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had
tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped
hands for good-bye at the Fall River station, and he
had turned away alone, the conviction remained with
him of having saved out of their meeting much more
than he had sacrificed.

He wandered back to the club, and went and sat
alone in the deserted library, turning and turning over
in his thoughts every separate second of their hours
together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear
under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide
on returning to Europe--returning to her husband--it
would not be because her old life tempted her, even on
the new terms offered. No: she would go only if she
felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a
temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set
up. Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he
did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on
himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.

In the train these thoughts were still with him. They
enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which
the faces about him looked remote and indistinct: he
had a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow-travellers
they would not understand what he was saying. In this
state of abstraction he found himself, the following
morning, waking to the reality of a stifling September
day in New York. The heat-withered faces in the long
train streamed past him, and he continued to stare at
them through the same golden blur; but suddenly, as
he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came
closer and forced itself upon his consciousness. It was,
as he instantly recalled, the face of the young man he
had seen, the day before, passing out of