They flanked opposite
ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities,
redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor
of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity,
from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past.
I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit
in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk,
by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at
such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed
most in place.
It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember,
two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock
of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a
violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met
my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed.
There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which,
after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.
An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear
to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced
me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone
else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind.
I had not seen it in Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere.
The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had,
on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance,
become a solitude.
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