ther does not catch the amusement, but remains grave
and thoughtful. She does not speak; but the handsome eyes that rest
so lovingly on the speaker are full of something from the past--some
record that it would be an utter bewilderment to Sally to read--a
bewilderment far beyond that crux of the moment which maybe has struck
her young mind for the first time--the old familiar puzzle of the
change that comes to all of us in our transition from first to last
experience of the strange phenomenon we call a friend. Sally can't
make it out--the way a silly lad, love-struck about her indifferent
self so short a while back, has become a totally altered person, the
husband of her schoolmate, an actual identity of life and thought and
feeling; he who was in those early days little more than a suit of
clothes and a new prayer-book.

But if that is so strange to Sally, how measurelessly stranger is she
herself to her mother beside her! And the man they are waiting and
watching for, who is somewhere between this and St. Egbert's station
in Padlock's venerable 'bus, what a crux is _he_, compared now to
that intoxicated young lover of two-and-twenty years ago, in that
lawn-tennis garden that has passed so utterly from his memory! And a
moment's doubt, "But--has it?" is caught and absorbed by what seemed
to Rosalind now an almost absurd fact--that, a week before, he had
been nothing but a _fidus Achates_ of that other young man provided
to make up the lawn-tennis set, and that it was that other young man
at first, not he, that belonged to _her_. And he had changed away so
easily to--who was it? Jessie Nairn, to be sure--and left the coast
clear for his friend. Whatever now _was_ his name? Oh dear, what a
fool was Rosalind! said she to herself, to have half let slip that it
was _he_ that was Fenwick, and not Gerry at all. All this compares
itself with Sally's experience of Bradshaw's metamorphosis, and her
own seems the stranger.

Then a moment of sharp pain that she cannot talk to Sally of these
things, but must lead a secret life in her own silent heart. And then
she comes back into the living world, and finds Sally well on with
the development of another topic.

"Of course, poor dears! They've not played a note together since the
row. It's been nothing but Kensington Gardens or the Albert Hall. But
I'm afraid he's no better. If only he _could_ be, it would make all
the difference."

"What's that, darling? _Who_ could be...? Not