Raising his hat, he said conventionally enough:  “Old friends should have much to say to each other.  Will you excuse me?”

Mrs. Detlor instantly replied in as conventional a tone:  “But you will not desert me?  I shall be hereabout, and you will take me back to the coach?”

The assurance was given, and the men bowed to each other.  Hagar saw a smile play ironically on Telford’s face—­saw it followed by a steellike fierceness in the eye.  He replied to both in like fashion, but one would have said the advantage was with Telford—­he had the more remarkable personality.

The two were left alone.  They passed through the cloisters without a word.  Hagar saw the two figures disappear down the long vista of groined arches.  “I wish to heaven I could see how this will all end,” he muttered.  Then he joined Baron and Mildred Margrave.

Telford and Mrs. Detlor passed out upon a little bridge spanning the stream, still not speaking.  As if by mutual consent, they made their way up the bank and the hillside to the top of a pretty terrace, where was a rustic seat among the trees.  When they reached it, he motioned to her to sit.  She shook her head, however, and remained standing close to a tree.

“What you wish to say—­for I suppose you do wish to say something—­will be brief, of course?”

He looked at her almost curiously.

“Have you nothing kind to say to me, after all these years?” he asked quietly.

“What is there to say now more than—­then?”

“I cannot prompt you if you have no impulse.  Have you none?”

“None at all.  You know of what blood we are, we southerners.  We do not change.”

“You changed.”  He knew he ought not to have said that, for he understood what she meant.

“No, I did not change.  Is it possible you do not understand?  Or did you cease to be a southerner when you became”—­

“When I became a villain?” He smiled ironically.  “Excuse me.  Go on, please.”

“I was a girl, a happy girl.  You killed me.  I did not change.  Death is different. * * * But why have you come to speak of this to me?  It was ages ago.  Resurrections are a mistake, believe me.”  She was composed and deliberate now.  Her nerve had all come back.  There had been one swift wave of the feeling that once flooded her girl’s heart.  It had passed and left her with the remembrance of her wrongs and the thought of unhappy years—­through all which she had smiled, at what cost, before the world!  Come what would, he should never know that, even now, the man he once was remained as the memory of a beautiful dead thing—­not this man come to her like a ghost.

“I always believed you,” he answered quietly, “and I see no reason to change.”

“In that case we need say no more,” she said, opening her red parasol and stepping slightly forward into the sunshine as if to go.

There ran into his face a sudden flush.  She was harder, more cruel, than he had thought were possible to any woman.  “Wait,” he said angrily, and put out his hand as if to stop her.  “By heaven, you shall!”