Mrs. Detlor turned for an instant and saw her.

Telford had gazed calmly, seriously, at Mrs. Detlor, wondering at nothing, possessed by a strange, quieting feeling.  There was, for the moment, no thought of right or wrong, misery or disaster, past or future, only—­this is she!  In the wild whistle of arctic winds he had sworn that he would cease to remember, but her voice ran laughing through them as it did through the blossoms of the locust trees at Tellavie, and he could not forget.  When the mists rose from the blue lake on a summer plain, the rosy breath of the sun bearing them up and scattering them like thistledown, he said that he would think no more of her; but, stooping to drink, he saw her face in the water, as in the hill spring at Tellavie, and he could not forget.  When he rode swiftly through the long prairie grass, each pulse afire, a keen, joyful wind playing on him as he tracked the buffalo, he said he had forgotten, but he felt her riding beside him as she had done on the wide savannas of the south, and he knew that he could not forget.  When he sat before some lodge in a pleasant village and was waited on by soft voiced Indian maidens and saw around him the solitary content of the north, he believed that he had ceased to think; but, as the maidens danced with slow monotony and grave, unmelodious voices, there came in among them an airy, sprightly figure, singing as the streams do over the pebbles, and he could not forget.  When in those places where women are beautiful, gracious and soulless, he saw that life can be made into mere convention and be governed by a code, he said that he had learned how to forget; but a pale young figure rose before him with the simple reproach of falsehood, and he knew that he should always remember.

She stood before him now.  Maybe some premonition—­some such smother at the heart as Hamlet knew—­came to him then, made him almost statue-like in his quiet and filled his face with a kind of tragical beauty.  Hagar saw it and was struck by it.  If he had known Jack Gladney and how he worshiped this man, he would have understood the cause of the inspiration.  It was all the matter of a moment.  Then Mark Telford stepped down, still uncovered, and came to them.  He did not offer his hand, but bowed gravely and said, “I hardly expected to meet you here, Mrs. Detlor, but I am very glad.”

He then bowed to Hagar.

Mrs. Detlor bowed as gravely and replied in an enigmatical tone, “One is usually glad to meet one’s countrymen in a strange land.”

“Quite so,” he said, “and it is far from Tellavie."’

“It is not so far as it was yesterday,” she added.

At that they began to walk toward the garden leading to the cloisters.  Hagar wondered whether Mrs. Detlor wished to be left alone with Telford.  As if divining his thoughts, she looked up at him and answered his mute question, following it with another of incalculable gentleness.