We met at a dinner. It was at a house the Tarvrilles had taken for the season in Mayfair. The drawing-room was a big white square apartment with several big pictures and a of plate glass above the fireplace in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored portrait in pastel—larger than I had ever thought pastels could be. Except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless. It was a brilliant dinner, with a predominating note of ; three of the women wore ruby ; and Ellersley was present just back from Arabia, and Ethel Manton, Lady Hendon and the Duchess of Clynes. I was greeted by Lady Tarvrille, to Ellersley and Lady Hendon, and then discovered a lady in a dress of blue and pearls quite still under a picture in the opposite corner of the room and regarding me . It was Mary. Some man was beside her, a tall grey man with a broad ribbon, and I think he must have spoken of me to her. It was as if she had just turned to look at me.  
Constantly during those intervening months I had been thinking of meeting her. None the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as of . There she stood like something amazingly forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. She struck me in that brief crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been when we had made love in Burnmore Park; there were her eyes, at once frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she seemed to be something altogether different from the memories I had cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid than they had recorded. Her face lit now with recognition.
 
I went across to her at once, with some dull obviousness upon my lips.
 
"And so you are back from Africa at last," she said, still unsmiling. "I saw about you in the papers.... You had a good time."
 
"I had great good luck," I replied.
 
"I never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a soldier."
 
I think I said that luck made soldiers.
 
Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our minds were remote from the words upon............