She threw up her veil.  She was still beautiful, though the years had touched her; a little more matronly—­much more homely.  Or was it only that he was much less homely now—­a man of the world—­the sense of homeliness being relative?  Her face had grown to be pre-eminently of the sort that would be called interesting.  Her habiliments were of a demure and sober cast, though she was one who had used to dress so airily and so gaily.  Years had laid on a few shadows too in this.

‘I received your letter,’ she said, when the momentary embarrassment of their first approach had passed.  ’And I thought I would walk across the hills to-day, as it was fine.  I have just called at the inn, and they told me you were out.  I was now on my way homeward.’

He hardly listened to this, though he intently gazed at her.  ‘Christine,’ he said, ‘one word.  Are you free?’

‘I—­I am in a certain sense,’ she replied, colouring.

The announcement had a magical effect.  The intervening time between past and present closed up for him, and moved by an impulse which he had combated for fifteen years, he seized her two hands and drew her towards him.

She started back, and became almost a mere acquaintance.  ’I have to tell you,’ she gasped, ‘that I have—­been married.’

Nicholas’s rose-coloured dream was immediately toned down to a greyish tinge.

‘I did not marry till many years after you had left,’ she continued in the humble tones of one confessing to a crime.  ‘Oh Nic,’ she cried reproachfully, ‘how could you stay away so long?’

‘Whom did you marry?’

‘Mr. Bellston.’

‘I—­ought to have expected it.’  He was going to add, ‘And is he dead?’ but he checked himself.  Her dress unmistakably suggested widowhood; and she had said she was free.

‘I must now hasten home,’ said she.  ’I felt that, considering my shortcomings at our parting so many years ago, I owed you the initiative now.’

’There is some of your old generosity in that.  I’ll walk with you, if I may.  Where are you living, Christine?’

’In the same house, but not on the old conditions.  I have part of it on lease; the farmer now tenanting the premises found the whole more than he wanted, and the owner allowed me to keep what rooms I chose.  I am poor now, you know, Nicholas, and almost friendless.  My brother sold the Froom-Everard estate when it came to him, and the person who bought it turned our home into a farmhouse.  Till my father’s death my husband and I lived in the manor-house with him, so that I have never lived away from the spot.’

She was poor.  That, and the change of name, sufficiently accounted for the inn-servant’s ignorance of her continued existence within the walls of her old home.

It was growing dusk, and he still walked with her.  A woman’s head arose from the declivity before them, and as she drew nearer, Christine asked him to go back.