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He remembered seeing her though his grim, broken window, floating by peacefully on her umbrella, eyes locked straight ahead.
But she knew he was watching. He would learn soon enough that she was always watching in some way, if not physically there then cosmically there.
He didn’t rightly understand what that means, but he nodded his head when she said the words to him.
That would come later. This first time she glared at him, staring right through the filth around him to poke at his soul, it was like being struck by lightning.
“Rude to stare, you know,” she informed him, turning up her nose.
In later years he would laugh at such a statement. In later years he would take her hand and kiss it and she would beam.
(Many years later, when he asked her to take his hand in marriage she would shake her hand. “It simply wouldn’t be fair to you, Bert. I’ve never been one for sentiment, and it’s quite likely I would outlive you.” Always practical, Mary was.)
When he was sixty he’d sit by his window, his joints stiff from merrily leaping among the chimneys of London. She would fly by, off to help the next hapless family. Her head would turn in his direction.
She would look at him, not through him now.