I think I must begin by putting down an odd remark which has suggested itself to me since Laura came back.

When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet.  The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.  After the first happiness of my meeting with Laura was over, after we had sat down together hand in hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to talk, I felt this strangeness instantly, and I could see that she felt it too.  It has partially worn away, now that we have fallen back into most of our old habits, and it will probably disappear before long.  But it has certainly had an influence over the first impressions that I have formed of her, now that we are living together again—­for which reason only I have thought fit to mention it here.

She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed.

Changed in person, and in one respect changed in character.  I cannot absolutely say that she is less beautiful than she used to be—­I can only say that she is less beautiful to me.

Others, who do not look at her with my eyes and my recollections, would probably think her improved.  There is more colour and more decision and roundness of outline in her face than there used to be, and her figure seems more firmly set and more sure and easy in all its movements than it was in her maiden days.  But I miss something when I look at her—­something that once belonged to the happy, innocent life of Laura Fairlie, and that I cannot find in Lady Glyde.  There was in the old times a freshness, a softness, an ever-varying and yet ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her face, the charm of which it is not possible to express in words, or, as poor Hartright used often to say, in painting either.  This is gone.  I thought I saw the faint reflection of it for a moment when she turned pale under the agitation of our sudden meeting on the evening of her return, but it has never reappeared since.  None of her letters had prepared me for a personal change in her.  On the contrary, they had led me to expect that her marriage had left her, in appearance at least, quite unaltered.  Perhaps I read her letters wrongly in the past, and am now reading her face wrongly in the present?  No matter!  Whether her beauty has gained or whether it has lost in the last six months, the separation either way has made her own dear self more precious to me than ever, and that is one good result of her marriage, at any rate!