One of Elizabeth’s companions intervened—­he was the one who had pricked up his ears at the mention of the Manhattan Syndicate.

“Say, Elizabeth,” he remarked, “I’d like to meet your friend.”

Elizabeth, with a frown, performed the introduction.

“Mr. Anthony Cruxhall — Mr. Tavernake!”

Mr. Cruxhall held out a fat white hand, on the little finger of which glittered a big diamond ring.

“Say, are you the Mr. Tavernake that was surveyor to the prospecting party sent out by the Manhattan Syndicate?” he inquired.

“I was,” Tavernake admitted, briefly.  “I still am, I hope.”

“Then you’re just the man I was hoping to meet,” Mr. Cruxhall declared.  “Won’t you sit down with us right here?  I’d like to talk some about that trip.  I’m interested in the Syndicate.”

Tavernake shook his head.

“I’ve had enough of work for a time,” he said.  “Besides, I couldn’t talk about it till after my report to the meeting to-morrow.”

“Just a few words,” Mr. Cruxhall persisted.  “We’ll have a bottle of champagne, eh?”

“You will excuse me, I am sure,” Tavernake replied, “when I tell you that it would not be correct on my part to discuss my trip until after I have handed in my report to the company.  I am very glad to have seen you again, Mrs. Gardner.”

“But you are not going!” she exclaimed, in dismay.

“I have left Mr. Pritchard alone,” Tavernake answered.

Elizabeth smiled, and waved her hand to the solitary figure.

“Our friend Mr. Pritchard again,” she remarked.  “Well, it is really a curious meeting, isn’t it?  I wonder,”—­she lifted her head to his and her eyes called him closer to hers—­“have you forgotten everything?”

He pointed over the roofs of the houses.  His back was to the river and he pointed westward.

“I have been in a country where one forgets,” he answered.  “I think that I have thrown the knapsack of my follies away.  I think that it is buried.  There are some things which I do not forget, but they are scarcely to be spoken of.”

“You are a strange young man,” she said.  “Was I wrong, or were you not once in love with me?”

“I was terribly in love with you,” Tavernake confessed.

“Yet you tore up my cheque and flung yourself away when you found out that my standard of morals was not quite what you had expected,” she murmured.  “Haven’t you got over that quixoticism a little, Leonard?”

He drew a deep sigh.

“I am thankful to say,” he declared, earnestly, “that I have not got over it, that, if anything, my prejudices are stronger than ever.”

She sat for a moment quite still, and her face had become hard and expressionless.  She was looking past him, past the line of lights, out into the blue darkness.

“Somehow,” she said, softly, “I always prayed that you might remember.  You were the one true thing I had ever met, you were in earnest.  It is past, then?”