But come now, Mr. Fenwick, you don't mean to say you don't know
if you ever had a sweetheart?" And he had replied with a laugh: "My
dear Miss Sally, I'm sure I must have had plenty of sweethearts.
Perhaps it's because I had so many that I have forgotten them
all--all--all! They are all gone with the rest. I can do sums, and can
speak French, but what school I learned to keep accounts at I can't
tell you; and as to where I lived (as I must have done) among French
people to speak French, I can tell no more than Adam." And then he had
become rather reserved and silent till he got up to go, and they had
not liked to press him for more. The pained look they had often been
distressed to see came on his face, and he pressed his fingers on his
eyelids as though shutting out the present world might help him to
recall the past; then with a rough head-shake of his thick hair, like
a big dog, and a brushing of it about with both hands, as though he
would rouse this useless head of his to some sort of action, he put
the whole thing aside, and talked of other matters till he left the
house.

But when he and Mrs. Nightingale found themselves alone in the road,
enjoying the delicious west wind that meant before the morning to
become an equinoctial gale, and blow down chimney-pots and sink ships,
he turned to her and went back to what they had been talking of. She
could see the fine strong markings of his face in the moonlight, the
great jaw and firm lips, the handsome nose damaged by a scar that lay
true across the bridge of it, and looked white in the gleam of the
moon, the sad large eyelids and the grave eyes that had retaken the
look he had shaken off. She could note and measure every change
maturity had stamped upon him, and could see behind it the boy
that had come to meet her at the station at Umballa twenty years
before--had met her full of hope, met her to claim his reward after
the long delay through the hideous days of the pestilence, to
inaugurate the anticipated hours of happiness he had trembled to dream
of. And the worst of the cholera wards that had filled the last months
of his life with horror had held nothing for him so bad as the tale
she had to tell or conceal. She could see back upon it as they stood
there in the moonlight. Do not say she was not a strong woman.

"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale," Fenwick said, "it's always a night
of this sort that brings back one's youth? You know what I mean?"

"I think I under