en carefully arranged.

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 deat