“But what of—­of the other?” she murmured as she stood at the window of her room watching the messenger boy bicycling across the square.  “Why does not he—­he, too—?”

She put her chin in the air and turned about, looking abstractedly at the rugs on the parquetry.

Lloyd’s vacation had really begun two days before.  Her name was off the roster of the house, and till the end of the month her time was her own.  The afternoon was hot and very still.  Even in the cool, stone-built agency, with its windows wide and heavily shaded with awnings, the heat was oppressive.  For a long time Lloyd had been shut away from fresh air and the sun, and now she suddenly decided to drive out in the City’s park.  She rang up her stable and ordered Lewis to put her ponies to her phaeton.

She spent a delightful two hours in the great park, losing herself in its farthest, shadiest, and most unfrequented corners.  She drove herself, and intelligently.  Horses were her passion, and not Lewis himself understood their care and management better.  Toward the cool of the day and just as she had pulled the ponies down to a walk in a long, deserted avenue overspanned with elms and great cottonwoods she was all at once aware of an open carriage that had turned into the far end of the same avenue approaching at an easy trot.  It drew near, and she saw that its only occupant was a man leaning back rather limply in the cushions.  As the eye of the trained nurse fell upon him she at once placed him in the category of convalescents or chronic invalids, and she was vaguely speculating as to the nature of his complaint when the carriage drew opposite her phaeton, and she recognised Richard Ferriss.

Ferriss, but not the same Ferriss to whom she had said good-bye on that never-to-be-forgotten March afternoon, with its gusts and rain, four long years ago.  The Ferriss she had known then had been an alert, keen man, with quick, bright eyes, alive to every impression, responsive to every sensation, living his full allowance of life.  She was looking now at a man unnaturally old, of deadened nerves, listless.  As he caught sight of her and recognised her he suddenly roused himself with a quick, glad smile and with a look in his eyes that to Lloyd was unmistakable.  But there was not that joyful, exuberant start she had anticipated, and, for that matter, wished.  Neither did Lloyd set any too great store by the small amenities of life, but that Ferriss should remain covered hurt her a little.  She wondered how she could note so trivial a detail at such a moment.  But this was Ferriss.

Her heart was beating fast and thick as she halted her ponies.  The driver of the carriage jumped down and held the door for Ferriss, and the chief engineer stepped quickly toward her.

So it was they met after four years—­and such years—­unexpectedly, without warning or preparation, and not at all as she had expected.  What they said to each other in those first few moments Lloyd could never afterward clearly remember.  One incident alone detached itself vividly from the blur.