"Hagar Ashendyne.--And I don't know yours."
"Denny Gayde.... I tried to find you in the crowd that night--the night of the meeting, you remember--but you were gone."
"Yes. And for weeks after that night I used to think that perhaps I might meet you on the street any day. And then I went away."
The sun was dazzling where they stood. People, too, were coming down the stairs behind them.
"Let us go somewhere where we can talk," said Hagar; "the gardens over there--have you time?"
"I'm here on a holiday. I came yesterday. I don't know a soul and I was lonely. I've all the time there is."
They crossed the street, passed under an arch of blossoming vines, and entered the Royal Victoria's garden--deserted, cool, and silent as when Hagar had quitted it earlier in the morning. Built high above the ground, about the vast trunk of a vast silk-cotton tree was a square, railed platform reached by a flight of steps. A bench ran around it; it was a cool and airy perch, chequered with shadows of leaf and twig and with a sight of the azure sea. The two mounted the steps, and moving around the trunk to a well-shaded angle, sat down. No one at all seemed near; for solitude it was much like a tree house which, shipwrecked, they might have built on a desert island.
"Life's the most curious thing!" said Gayde.
"Isn't it? 'Curiouser and curiouser!' said Alice. I was twelve years old that summer we shared the apple turnovers."
"We didn't share them. You gave me all.--I was nineteen."
"And then--how many years?--Nine, isn't it?--that night at that Socialist meeting, when you spoke--"
"What were you doing there? I asked about you--I got to know well many of the people who were there that night--but no one could identify you. And though I kept you in mind, and looked for you, too, I could never find you again."
"I was spending the winter in New York. That night we had missed the theatre. We walked down Fourth Avenue and across--we were seeing New York at night. A crowd was going into that hall, and we went in too--"
"Not until I got home that night did I remember that I did not know your name.... And in a month I was upon the ocean, and I have been in America very little in all the years since. I am here this winter with my father.... And you?"