ak into the pause that followed.
The look of fixed bewilderment on his face was painful, but she did
not dare any suggestion of guidance to his mind. She had succeeded but
ill before in going back to the cause of their own early severance.
Yet that was what she naturally had most at heart, and longed to speak
of. Could she have chosen, she would have liked to resume it once for
all, in spite of the pain--to look the dreadful past in the face,
and then agree to forget it together. She was hungry to tell him that
even when he broke away from her that last time she saw him at
Umballa--broke away from her so roughly that his action had all the
force and meaning of a blow--she only saw _his_ image of the wrong she
had done, or seemed to have done him; that she had nothing for him
through it all but love and forgiveness. At least, she would have
tried to make sure that he had been able to connect and compare the
tale she had told him since their reunion with his new memory of the
facts of twenty years ago. But she dared say nothing further as yet.
For his part, at this moment, he seemed strangely willing to let all
the old story lapse, and to dwell only on the incredible chance that
had brought them again together. All that eventful day our story began
with had leaped into the foreground of his mind.

Presently he said, still almost whispering hoarsely, with a constant
note of amazement and something like panic in his voice: "If it hadn't
happened--the accident--I suppose I should have gone back to the
hotel. And what should I have done next? I should never have found
you and Sally...."

"Were you poor, Gerry darling?"

"Frightfully rich! Gold-fields, mining-place up the Yu-kon. Near the
Arctic Circle." He went on in a rapid undertone, as if he were trying
to supply briefly what he knew the woman beside him must be yearning
to know, if not quite unlike other women. "I wasn't well off
before--didn't get on at the Bar at St. Louis--but not poor exactly.
Then I made a small pile cattle-ranching in Texas, and somehow went
to live at Quebec. There were a lot of French Canadians I took to.
Then after that, 'Frisco and the gold...."

"Gerry dear!"

"Yes, love, what?"

"Have you any relations living in England?"

"Heaps, but I haven't spoken to one of them for years and years--not
since _then_. One of them's a Bart. with a fungus on his nose in
Shropshire. He's an uncle. Then there's my sister, if she's not
dead--my sister