The parting was more painful to him than he had expected, because to her it was such an undisguised and terrible agony.

“You will not forget me?” she pleaded.  “You will never, never hate me?  You will always love me?  You are the only person who has ever made the world pleasant to me; and you have made it so pleasant! so different from what it was! a new earth to me! a star!  I will come back as soon as this business will let me.  Some day I will come back, never to go away.  Oh, will not that be delightful?”

Her extreme distress, her terror lest she might not return, her forebodings lest he should some day cease to love her, impressed him for a moment—­only for a truant moment—­with doubts as to a mystery.  As he left the railway station, full of gratitude for the last glance of her loving eyes, he asked himself once or twice, “What is it?”

What was it?

We will follow her.  She is ominously sad during the lonely journey:  she is almost stern by the time she arrives in New York.  In place of the summer’s sweetness and gayety, there is a wintry and almost icy expression in her face, as if she were about to encounter trials to which she had been long accustomed, and which she had learned to bear with hardness if not with resentment.

No one meets her at the railway station, no one at the door of the sombre house where her carriage stops—­no one until she has passed up stairs into a darkling parlor.

There she is received by the man whom she has so often described to Deighton—­a man of thin, erect form, a high and narrow forehead, regular and imperturbable features, fixed and filmy black eyes, a mechanical carriage, an icy demeanor.

At sight of her he slightly bowed—­then he advanced slowly to her and took her hand:  he seemed to be hesitating whether he should give her any further welcome.

“You need not kiss me,” she said, her eyes fixed on the floor.  “You do not wish to do it.”

He sighed, as if he too were unhappy, or at least weary; but he drew his hand away and resumed his walk up and down the room.

“So you chose to pass your summer in a village?” he presently said, in the tone of a man who has ceased to rule, but not ceased to criticise.  “I hope you liked it.”

“I told you in my letters that I liked it,” she replied in an expressionless monotone.

“And I told you in my letters that I did not like it.  It would have been more decent in you to stay in Portland, among the people whom I had requested to take care of you.  However, you are accustomed to have your own way.  I can only observe that when a woman will have her own way, she ought to pay her own way.”

A flush, perhaps of shame, perhaps of irritation, crossed her hitherto pale face, but she made no response to the scoff, and continued to look at the floor.

After a few seconds, during which neither of them broke the silence, she seemed to understand that the reproof was over, and she quietly quitted the room.