She seemed to hear again the eager, wooing words.

He never wrote to her now. She believed he was in town, probably amusing
himself as he had amused himself at Monte Carlo, passing the time in a
round of gaieties, careless flirtations, possibly deeper intrigues.
Crowther had probably kept him straight through the winter, but she did
not believe that Crowther's influence would be lasting. There was a sting
in the very thought of Crowther. She was sure now that he had always
known the bitter secret that Piers had kept from her. It had been the
bond between them. Piers had obviously feared betrayal, but Crowther had
not deemed it his business to betray him. He had suffered the deception
to continue. She recognized that his position had been a difficult one;
but it did not soften her heart towards him. Her heart had grown hard
towards all men of late. She sometimes thought that but for Jeanie it
would have atrophied altogether. There were so few things nowadays that
seemed to touch her. She could not even regret her lost baby. But yet the
memory of Piers sitting on that rock at her feet pierced her oddly;
Piers, the passionate, the adoring, the hot-blooded; Piers the
invincible; Piers the prince!

She turned from the spot with a wrung feeling of heart-break. She
wished--how she wished--that she had died!

In that moment she realized that she was no longer alone. A man's figure,
thick-set and lounging, was sauntering towards her along the sand. He
seemed to move with extreme leisureliness, yet his approach was but a
matter of seconds. His hands were in his pockets, his hat rammed down
over his eyes.

There seemed to her to be something vaguely familiar about him, though
wherein it lay she could not have told. She stood and awaited him with
the certainty that he was coming with the express purpose of joining her.
She knew him; she was sure she knew him, though who he was she had not
the faintest idea.

He reached her, lifted his cap, and the sun glinted on a head of fiery
red hair. "I thought I was not mistaken, Lady Evesham," he said.

She recognized him with an odd leap of the pulses, and in a moment held
out her hand. "Dr. Wyndham!" she said. "How amazing!"

"Why amazing?" said Wyndham. He held her hand for a second while his
green eyes scanned her face. When he dropped it she felt that he had made
a full and exhaustive inspection, and she was strangely disconcerted, as
if in some fashion he had gained an unfair adv