ld guess, an old theory, one she had
never spoken to anybody, but had pondered much in silence, again
presented itself interrogatively to her mind.

The door opened; the butler mumbled a name; and she saw a tall,
white-haired, pale old man smiling at her and holding out his hands.
It took her a little while to realise who it was. With an unthinking
disallowance for the action of time, she had been expecting a young
fellow of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired and ruddy.

Perhaps he, on his side, was taken aback a little to meet a
middle-aged lady in a cap.

III.

After dinner he would not let her leave him, but returned with her to
the drawing-room, and she said that he might smoke. He smoked odd
little Cuban cigarettes, whereof the odour was delicate and aromatic.
They had talked of everything; they had laughed and sighed over their
ancient joys and sorrows. We know how, in the Courts of Memory, Mirth
and Melancholy wander hand in hand. She had cried a little when her
husband and her brother were first spoken of, but at some comic
reminiscence of them, a moment afterwards, she was smiling through her
tears. 'Do you remember so-and-so?' and 'What has become of
such-a-one?' were types of the questions they asked each other,
conjuring up old friends and enemies like ghosts out of the past.
Incidentally, he had described Porto Rico and its negroes and its
Spaniards, its climate, its fauna and its flora.

In the drawing-room they sat on opposite sides of the fire, and were
silent for a bit. Profiting by the permission she had given him, he
produced one of his Cuban cigarettes, opened it at its ends, unrolled
it, rolled it up again, and lit it.

'Now the time has come for you to tell me what I most want to know,'
she said.

'What is that?'

'Why you went away.'

'Oh,' he murmured.

She waited a minute. Then, 'Tell me,' she urged.

'Do you remember Mary Isona?' he asked.

She glanced up at him suddenly, as if startled. 'Mary Isona? Yes, of
course.'

'Well, I was in love with her.'

'You were in love with Mary Isona?'

'I was very much in love with her. I have never got over it, I'm
afraid.'

She gazed fixedly at the fire. Her lips were compressed. She saw a
slender girl, in a plain black frock, with a sensitive, pale face,
luminous, sad, dark eyes, and a mass of dark, waving hair--Mary
Isona, of Italian parentage, a little music teacher, whose only
relation to the world Theodore Vellan lived in was profe