“But, I am, though,” cried the lad, shaking her hand as if he would shake it off.  “And I call myself very clever to have remembered you, though I was such a little fellow when you left us, and I have only seen your photograph since.  But you are not a bit altered—­not one bit.  And as I knew by your last letter to Archy that you were at Brighton, I thought I’d risk it and speak.  Hurra!  How very jolly!”

He had grown a handsome lad, the pretty wee Davie, an honest-looking lad too, apparently, and she was glad to see him.  From the dignity of his eighteen years and five feet ten of height, he looked down upon the governess, and patronized her quite tenderly—­dismissing his friend and walking home with her, telling her on the way all his affairs and that of his family with the volubility of little David Dalziel at St. Andrews.

“No, I’ve not forgotten St. Andrews one bit, though I was so small.  I remember poor old grannie, and her cottage, and the garden, and the Links, and the golfing, and Mr. Roy.  By-the-by, what has become of Mr. Roy?”

The suddenness of the question, nay, the very sound of a name totally silent for so many years, made Fortune’s heart throb till its beating was actual pain.  Then came a sudden desperate hope, as she answered: 

“I can not tell.  I have never heard any thing of him.  Have you?”

“No—­yet, let me see.  I think Archy once got a letter from him, a year or so after he went away; but we lost it somehow, and never answered it.  We have never heard any thing since.”

Miss Williams sat down on one of the benches facing the sea, with a murmured excuse of being “tired.”  One of her little girls crept beside her, stealing a hand in hers.  She held it fast, her own shook so; but gradually she grew quite herself again.  “I have been ill,” she explained, “and can not walk far.  Let us sit down here a little.  You were speaking about Mr. Roy, David?”

“Yes.  What a good fellow he was!  We called him Rob Roy, I remember, but only behind his back.  He was strict, but he was a jolly old soul for all that.  I believe I should know him again any day, as I did you.  But perhaps he is dead; people die pretty fast abroad, and ten years is a long time, isn’t it?”

“A long time.  And you never got any more letters?”

“No; or if they did come, they were lost, being directed probably to the care of poor old grannie, as ours was.  We thought it so odd, after she was dead, you know.”

Thus the boy chattered on—­his tongue had not shortened with his increasing inches—­and every idle word sank down deep in his old governess’s heart.

Then it was only her whom Robert Roy had forsaken.  He had written to his boys, probably would have gone on writing had they answered his letter.  He was neither faithless nor forgetful.  With an ingenuity that might have brought to any listener a smile or a tear, Miss Williams led the conversation round again till she could easily ask more concerning that one letter; but David, remembered little or nothing, except that it was dated from Shanghai, for his brothers had had a discussion whether Shanghai was in China or Japan.  Then, boy-like, they had forgotten the whole matter.