me so soon?" she said speaking on the threshold,
and pausing there to enjoy his surprise as he started to his feet and
looked at her.

The only traces of illness still visible in her face left a delicacy in
its outline which added refinement to her beauty. She was simply dressed
in muslin. Her plain straw bonnet had no other ornament than the
white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed. She had never looked
lovelier in her best days than she looked now, as she advanced to the
table at which he had been sitting, with a little basket of flowers that
she had brought with her from the country, and offered him her hand.

He looked anxious and careworn when she saw him closer. She interrupted
his first inquiries and congratulations to ask if he had remained in
London since they had parted--if he had not even gone away, for a few
days only, to see his friends in Suffolk? No; he had been in London
ever since. He never told her that the pretty parsonage house in Suffolk
wanted all those associations with herself in which the poor four walls
at Aaron's Buildings were so rich. He only said he had been in London
ever since.

"I wonder," she asked, looking him attentively in the face, "if you are
as happy to see me again as I am to see you?"

"Perhaps I am even happier, in my different way," he answered, with a
smile.

She took off her bonnet and scarf, and seated herself once more in her
own arm-chair. "I suppose this street is very ugly," she said; "and I am
sure nobody can deny that the house is very small. And yet--and yet it
feels like coming home again. Sit there where you used to sit; tell me
about yourself. I want to know all that you have done, all that you have
thought even, while I have been away." She tried to resume the endless
succession of questions by means of which she was accustomed to lure him
into speaking of himself. But she put them far less spontaneously, far
less adroitly, than usual. Her one all-absorbing anxiety in entering
that room was not an anxiety to be trifled with. After a quarter of an
hour wasted in constrained inquiries on one side, in reluctant replies
on the other, she ventured near the dangerous subject at last.

"Have you received the letters I wrote to you from the seaside?" she
asked, suddenly looking away from him for the first time.

"Yes," he said; "all."

"Have you read them?"

"Every one of them--many times over."

Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her. She had ke