They were already close. The closeness of people who have been talking through cold mornings and arriving at the natural proximity of honesty, which is not the same as the proximity of bodies, but tends to produce it. And he said very quietly with the care of a man finding the words rather than deploying them. "I have not known what to do with you." "That seems fair," she said. "I walked into your pond." "You looked at my books." "I look at everyone's books." "You looked at my books," he said again as if he meant something different the second time.
And she thought, "Yes, that is the thing." Actually, she had looked at his books the way she looked at everything with genuine interest, with the assumption that the books would tell her something true about the person who had chosen them, with no performance of appreciation and no strategy of impression. She had simply looked and he had noticed that she looked and it had disarranged something. "I leave Saturday," she said. "My address in London is in Brook Street. Constance has it."
He held her gaze. His storm blue eyes in the October morning with the lines around them that were learning slowly to rearrange themselves. "I am a very poor correspondent," he said. "I write formally, and the formality loses things that were present when I began the letter." "Write it anyway," she said.
"I am very good at reading between formal lines. It is a skill I developed with my father, who also wrote formally and meant considerably more than the formality contained." He reached out and took her hand. Not dramatically, not with any performance. He took her hand the way a man takes a hand when he has decided finally that the retreat has become more expensive than staying. Quietly, carefully, with the deliberateness of a decision that had been forming for nine mornings, and had arrived at its moment.
His hand was warm. Her hand, which had been cold all morning, because she had forgotten her gloves again in the way she forgot gloves in October, with reliable consistency, was immediately less cold. He held it. The morning was very still around them. Dioynes sat on the bank and appeared to find the whole situation entirely expected.
"Felicity," he said quietly, carefully, as if testing what it cost to say her name without the retreat. "Yes," she said. "The peonies bloom in June," he said. "On the south wall." "The light—there is a particular quality to it in June on the south wall." "I have not shown it to anyone." He paused.