Especially when, bit by bit, strange ghostly fragments of his old self began to re-appear in Robert Roy:  his keen delight in nature, his love of botanical or geological excursions.  Often he would go wandering down the familiar shore for hours in search of marine animals for the girls’ aquarium, and then would come and sit down at their tea-table, reading or talking, so like the Robert Roy of old that one of the little group, who always crept in the background, felt dizzy and strange, as if all her later years had been a dream, and she were living her youth over again, only with the difference aforesaid:  a difference sharp as that between death and life—­yet with something of the peace of death in it.

Sometimes, when they met at the innocent little tea parties which St. Andrews began to give—­for of course in that small community every body knew every body, and all their affairs to boot, often a good deal better than they did themselves, so that there was great excitement and no end of speculation over Mr. Roy—­sometimes meeting, as they were sure to do, and walking home together, with the moonlight shining down the empty streets, and the stars out by myriads over the silent distant sea, while the nearer tide came washing in upon the sands—­all was so like, so frightfully like, old times that it was very sore to bear.

But, as I have said, Miss Williams was Miss Williams, and Mr. Roy Mr. Roy, and there were her two girls always besides them; also his two boys, who soon took to “Auntie” as naturally as if they were really hers, or she theirs.

“I think they had better call you so, as the others do,” said Mr. Roy one day.  “Are these young ladies really related to you?”

“No; but I promised their father on his death-bed to take charge of them.  That is all.”

“He is dead, then.  Was he a great friend of yours?”

She felt the blood flashing all over her face, but she answered, steadily:  “Not a very intimate friend, but I respected him exceedingly.  He was a good man.  His daughters had a heavy loss when he died, and I am glad to be a comfort to them so long as they need me.”

“I have no doubt of it.”

This was the only question he ever asked her concerning her past life, though, by slow degrees, he told her a good deal of his own.  Enough to make her quite certain, even if her keen feminine instinct had not already divined the fact, that whatever there might have been in it of suffering, there was nothing in the smallest degree either to be ashamed of or to hide.  What Robert Roy of Shanghai had written about him had continued true.  As he said one day to her, “We never stand still.  We either grow better or worse.  You have not grown worse.”

Nor had he.  All that was good in him had developed, all his little faults had toned down.  The Robert Roy of today was slightly different from, but in no wise inferior to, the Robert Roy of her youth.  She saw it, and rejoiced in the seeing.