She was a bride then, and her husband, her brother Paul, and Theodore Vellan were bound in a league of ardent young-mannish friendship, a friendship that dated from the time when they had been undergraduates together at Oxford.  She thought of the three handsome, happy, highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen for each of them:  her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church, and Vellan—­not in politics, she could never understand his political aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his character—­but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she considered very unusual and pleasing.  She thought of this, and then she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead, and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events, for thirty years.  Not one of them had in any way distinguished himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his youth.

Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache.  Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle.  He was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all things, gentle—­with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the gentlest manners.  His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief element of his charm—­his gentleness, which was really a phase of his modesty.  ’He was very gentle, he was very modest, he was very graceful and kind,’ she said; and she remembered a hundred instances of his gentleness, his modesty, his kindness.  Oh, but he was no milksop.  He had plenty of spirit, plenty of fun; he was boyish, he could romp.  And at that, a scene repeated itself to her mind, a scene that had passed in this same drawing-room more than thirty years ago.  It was tea-time, and on the tea-table lay a dish of pearl biscuits, and she and her husband and Vellan were alone.  Her husband took a handful of pearl biscuits, and tossed them one by one into the air, while Vellan threw back his head, and caught them in his mouth as they came down—­that was one of his accomplishments.  She smiled as she remembered it, but at the same time she put her handkerchief to her eyes.

‘Why did he go away?  What could it have been?’ she wondered, her old bewilderment at his conduct, her old longing to comprehend it, reviving with something of the old force.  ’Could it have been...?  Could it have been...?’ And an old guess, an old theory, one she had never spoken to anybody, but had pondered much in silence, again presented itself interrogatively to her mind.

The door opened; the butler mumbled a name; and she saw a tall, white-haired, pale old man smiling at her and holding out his hands.  It took her a little while to realise who it was.  With an unthinking disallowance for the action of time, she had been expecting a young fellow of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired and ruddy.

Perhaps he, on his side, was taken aback a little to meet a middle-aged lady in a cap.