you even remembered that childish nonsense."

She raised her dark eyes to his face, and there was something in them
before which he shrank as one who feels pain.

"One word, Norman--only one word. That past which has been so much to
me--that past in which I have lived, even more than in the present or
the future--am I to look upon it as what you call nonsense?"

He took her hand in his.

"My dear Philippa," he said, "I hate myself for what I have to say--it
makes me detest even the sound of my own voice. Yet you are right--there
is nothing for us but perfect frankness; anything else would be foolish.
Neither your mother nor mine had any right to try to bind us. Such
things never answer, never prosper. I cannot myself imagine how they,
usually so sensible, came in this instance to disregard all dictates of
common sense. I have always looked upon the arrangement as mere
nonsense; and I hope you have done the same. You are free as air--and so
am I."

She made no answer, but, after a few minutes, when she had regained her
self-possession, she said:

"The sun is warm on the water--I think we had better return;" and, as
they went back, she spoke to him carelessly about the new rage for
garden-parties.

"Does she care or not?" thought Lord Arleigh to himself. "Is she pleased
or not? I cannot tell; the ways of women are inscrutable. Yet a strange
idea haunts me--an uncomfortable suspicion."

As he watched her, there seemed to him no trace of anything but
light-hearted mirth and happiness about her. She laughed and talked; she
was the center of attraction, the life of the _fete_. When he spoke to
her, she had a careless jest, a laughing word for him; yet he could not
divest himself of the idea that there was something behind all this. Was
it his fancy, or did the dark eyes wear every now and then an expression
of anguish? Was it his fancy, or did it really happen that when she
believed herself unobserved, the light died out of her face?

He was uncomfortable, without knowing why--haunted by a vague, miserable
suspicion he could not explain, by a presentiment he could not
understand--compelled against his will to watch her, yet unable to
detect anything in her words and manner that justified his doing so. It
had been arranged that after the _fete_ he should return to Verdun House
with Lady Peters and Philippa. He had half promised to dine and spend
the evening there, but now he wondered if that arrangement would be
ag