almost daily, exactly as Robert Roy had
used to do of old. Sometimes it was to Fortune Williams the strangest
reflex of former times; only--with a difference.

Unquestionably he was very much changed. In outward appearance more even
than the time accounted for. No man can knock about the world, in
different lands and climates, for seventeen years, without bearing
the marks of it. Though still under fifty, he had all the air of an
"elderly" man, and had grown a little "peculiar" in his ways, his modes
of thought and speech--except that he spoke so very little. He
accounted for this by his long lonely life in Australia, which had
produced, he said, an almost unconquerable habit of silence. Altogether,
he was far more of an old bachelor than she was of an old maid, and
Fortune felt this: felt, too, that in spite of her gray hairs she was in
reality quite as young as he--nay, sometimes younger; for her innocent,
simple, shut-up life had kept her young.

And he, what had his life been, in so far as he gradually betrayed it?
Restless, struggling; a perpetual battle with the world; having to hold
his own, and fight his way inch by inch--he who was naturally a born
student, to whom the whirl of a business career was especially obnoxious.
What had made him choose it? Once chosen, probably he could not help
himself; besides, he was not one to put his shoulder to the wheel and
then draw back. Evidently, with the grain or against the grain, he had
gone on with it; this sad, strange, wandering life, until he had "made
his fortune," for he told her so. But he said no more; whether he meant
to stay at home and spend it, or go out again to the antipodes (and he
spoke of those far lands without any distaste, even with a lingering
kindliness, for indeed he seemed to have no unkindly thought of any place
or person in all the world), his friend did not know.

His friend. That was the word. No other. After her first outburst of
uncontrollable emotion, to call Robert Roy her "love," even in fancy, or
to expect that he would deport himself in any lover-like way, became
ridiculous, pathetically ridiculous. She was sure of that. Evidently no
idea of the kind entered his mind. She was Miss Williams, and he was Mr.
Roy--two middle-aged people, each with their different responsibilities,
their altogether separate lives; and, hard as her own had been, it seemed
as if his had been the harder of the two--ay, though he was now a rich