“Perhaps I am even happier, in my different way,” he answered, with a smile.

She took off her bonnet and scarf, and seated herself once more in her own arm-chair.  “I suppose this street is very ugly,” she said; “and I am sure nobody can deny that the house is very small.  And yet—­and yet it feels like coming home again.  Sit there where you used to sit; tell me about yourself.  I want to know all that you have done, all that you have thought even, while I have been away.”  She tried to resume the endless succession of questions by means of which she was accustomed to lure him into speaking of himself.  But she put them far less spontaneously, far less adroitly, than usual.  Her one all-absorbing anxiety in entering that room was not an anxiety to be trifled with.  After a quarter of an hour wasted in constrained inquiries on one side, in reluctant replies on the other, she ventured near the dangerous subject at last.

“Have you received the letters I wrote to you from the seaside?” she asked, suddenly looking away from him for the first time.

“Yes,” he said; “all.”

“Have you read them?”

“Every one of them—­many times over.”

Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her.  She had kept her promise bravely.  The whole story of her life, from the time of the home-wreck at Combe-Raven to the time when she had destroyed the Secret Trust in her sister’s presence, had been all laid before him.  Nothing that she had done, nothing even that she had thought, had been concealed from his knowledge.  As he would have kept a pledged engagement with her, so she had kept her pledged engagement with him.  She had not faltered in the resolution to do this; and now she faltered over the one decisive question which she had come there to ask.  Strong as the desire in her was to know if she had lost or won him, the fear of knowing was at that moment stronger still.  She waited and trembled; she waited, and said no more.

“May I speak to you about your letters?” he asked.  “May I tell you—?”

If she had looked at him as he said those few words, she would have seen what he thought of her in his face.  She would have seen, innocent as he was in this world’s knowledge, that he knew the priceless value, the all-ennobling virtue, of a woman who speaks the truth.  But she had no courage to look at him—­no courage to raise her eyes from her lap.

“Not just yet,” she said, faintly.  “Not quite so soon after we have met again.”

She rose hurriedly from her chair, and walked to the window, turned back again into the room, and approached the table, close to where he was sitting.  The writing materials scattered near him offered her a pretext for changing the subject, and she seized on it directly.  “Were you writing a letter,” she asked, “when I came in?”

“I was thinking about it,” he replied.  “It was not a letter to be written without thinking first.”  He rose as he answered her to gather the writing materials together and put them away.