‘Nothing, Milly.  Take the things away, there’s a good girl.’

Emily had seated herself on the couch again; when the girl was gone she lay down, her hands beneath her head.  Long, long since she had had so much to think of as to-night.

At first she had found Wilfrid a good deal altered.  He looked so much older; his bearded face naturally caused that.  But before he had spoken twenty words how well she knew that the change was only of appearance.  His voice was a little deeper, but the tone and manner of his speaking carried her back to the days when they had first exchanged words when she was a governess at The Firs in Surrey, and Wilfrid was the interesting young fellow who had overworked himself at college.  The circumstances of to-day’s meeting had reproduced something of the timidity with which he had approached her when they were strangers.  This afternoon she had scarcely looked into his eyes, but she felt their gaze upon her, and felt their power as of old—­ah, fifty-fold stronger!

Was he married?  It was more than possible.  Nothing had escaped him inconsistent with that, and he was not likely to speak of it directly.  It would account for the nature of his embarrassment in talking with her; her keen insight distinguished something more than the hesitation which common memories would naturally cause.  And that pressure of the hand at parting which had made her heart leap with such agony, might well be his way of intimating to her that this meeting would have no sequel.  Was it to be expected that he should remain unmarried?  Had she hoped it?

It could not be called hope, but for two or three years something had grown in her which made life a succession of alternating longings and despairs.  For Emily was not so constituted that the phase of thought and feeling which had been brought about by the tragedy of her home could perpetuate itself and become her normal consciousness.  When she fled from Dunfield she believed that the impulses then so strong would prevail with her to the end of her life, that the motives which were then predominant in her soul would maintain their ruling force for ever.  And many months went by before she suspected that her imagination had deceived her; imagination, ever the most potent factor of her being, the source alike of her strength and her weakness.  But there came a day when the poignancy of her grief was subdued, and she looked around her upon a world more desolate than that in which she found herself on the day of her mother’s burial.  She began to know once more that she was young, and that existence stretched before her a limitless tract of barren endurance.