‘Lucy, don’t you know me?’ he said, when the servant had closed the door.

‘I knew you the instant I saw you!’ she returned cheerfully.  ’I don’t know why, but I always thought you would come back to your old town again.’

She gave him her hand, and then they sat down.  ’They said you were dead,’ continued Lucy, ’but I never thought so.  We should have heard of it for certain if you had been.’

‘It is a very long time since we met.’

’Yes; what you must have seen, Mr. Barnet, in all these roving years, in comparison with what I have seen in this quiet place!’ Her face grew more serious.  ’You know my husband has been dead a long time?  I am a lonely old woman now, considering what I have been; though Mr. Downe’s daughters—­all married—­manage to keep me pretty cheerful.’

‘And I am a lonely old man, and have been any time these twenty years.’

’But where have you kept yourself?  And why did you go off so mysteriously?’

’Well, Lucy, I have kept myself a little in America, and a little in Australia, a little in India, a little at the Cape, and so on; I have not stayed in any place for a long time, as it seems to me, and yet more than twenty years have flown.  But when people get to my age two years go like one!—­Your second question, why did I go away so mysteriously, is surely not necessary.  You guessed why, didn’t you?’

‘No, I never once guessed,’ she said simply; ’nor did Charles, nor did anybody as far as I know.’

’Well, indeed!  Now think it over again, and then look at me, and say if you can’t guess?’

She looked him in the face with an inquiring smile.  ’Surely not because of me?’ she said, pausing at the commencement of surprise.

Barnet nodded, and smiled again; but his smile was sadder than hers.

‘Because I married Charles?’ she asked.

’Yes; solely because you married him on the day I was free to ask you to marry me.  My wife died four-and-twenty hours before you went to church with Downe.  The fixing of my journey at that particular moment was because of her funeral; but once away I knew I should have no inducement to come back, and took my steps accordingly.’

Her face assumed an aspect of gentle reflection, and she looked up and down his form with great interest in her eyes.  ‘I never thought of it!’ she said.  ’I knew, of course, that you had once implied some warmth of feeling towards me, but I concluded that it passed off.  And I have always been under the impression that your wife was alive at the time of my marriage.  Was it not stupid of me!—­But you will have some tea or something?  I have never dined late, you know, since my husband’s death.  I have got into the way of making a regular meal of tea.  You will have some tea with me, will you not?’