“Yes; I knew that I should hear some tidings of you here.  There would be a lawyer, a steward, who would know.  I little thought, hoped, to see you yourself, Ida.  I came from the station to-night to look at the old place, to walk where we had walked, to stand where we had stood.  I stopped under the trees here and looked at the house, at the terrace where I had seen you, watched for you.  I could see that men had been at work, and I thought that you had sold the place, that the new people were altering it, and I cursed them in my heart; for every stone of it is sacred to me.  And then, as I stood looking, and asking myself where you were, the dogs came.  Even then it did not occur to me that you were still here—­at the Hall—­and when I saw you—­”

He stopped, and laughed shortly, as a man does when his emotion is almost too much for him.

“I’d made up my mind what to write to you; but, you see, I’d had no thought, no hope, of seeing you; and now—­ah, well, it’s hard to think of anything, with you in my arms!  But see here, Ida, there isn’t any need to say anything, is there?  You’ll come back with me to that new world—­”

What was it, what word in the tender, loving speech that, like a breath of wind sweeping away a mountain mist, cleared the mist from her mind, woke her from her strange, dream-like condition, recalled the past, and, alas! and alas! the present!

With a low cry, a cry of anguish—­one has heard it from the lips of a sufferer waking from the anodyne of sleep to fresh pain—­she tore herself from his arms, and with both hands to her head, stood regarding him, her face white, something like terror in her eyes.

“Ida!” he cried, rising and stretching out his hands to her.

She shrank back, putting out her hand as if to keep him off.

“Don’t—­don’t come near me!  Oh, how could I have forgotten!—­how could I!  I must have been mad!”

She wrung her hands and bit her lips as if she were tortured by the shame of it.  His arms fell to his sides, and he stood and looked at her with his teeth set.

“Ida, listen to me!  I—­I, too—­had forgotten.  It—­it was the delight of seeing you.  But, dearest, what does the past matter?  It is past, I have come back to you.”

She turned to him with suppressed passion.

“Why did you leave me?” came painfully from her white lips.

His face grew red and his eyes fell before hers for a moment.  At times his sacrifice of her to his father’s need had seemed not only inexcusable, but shameful; the shame of it now weighed upon him.

“Ida, for God’s sake listen to me!” for, as he had hesitated, she had turned from him with a gesture of repudiation.  “Listen to me!  There was nothing else for me to do; fate left me no alternative.  My father—­Ida, how can I tell you!—­my father’s good name, his reputation, were in my hands.  He had done so much for me—­everything!  There