ot have hesitated to say that worse than
either would be that he should recognise her only to slight her, and
make a jest, maybe, of the memories that were his and hers alike.

She had not long to wait. It needed just a moment's pause--no more--to
be sure no sequel of recognition would follow the blank stare that met
her gaze as she threw back the door, and looked this husband of hers
full in the face. None came, and her heart throbbed slower and slower.
It would be down to self-command in a few beats. Meanwhile, how about
that chance slip of her tongue? "Thornton" had to be accounted for.

The man's stare was indeed blank, for any sign of recognition that it
showed. It was none the less as intent and curious as was the scrutiny
that met it, looking in vain for a false lover long since fled, not a
retrievable one, but a memory of a sojourn in a garden and a collapse in
a desert. So little was left, to explain the past, in the face some
violence had twisted askew, close-shaved and scarred, one white scar on
the temple warping the grip in which its contractions held a cold green
orb that surely never was the eye that was a girl-fool's _ignis fatuus_,
twenty odd years ago. So little of the flawless teeth, which surely
those fangs never were!--fangs that told a tale of the place in which
they had been left to decay; for such was prison-life three-quarters of
a century since. It was strange, but Aunt M'riar, though she knew that
it was he, felt sick at heart that he should be so unlike himself.

He was the first to speak. "You'll know me again, mistress," he said. He
took his eyes off her to look attentively round the room. Uncle Mo's
sporting prints, prized records of ancient battles, caught his eye.
"Ho--that's it, is it?" said he, with a short nod of illumination, as
though he had made a point as a cross-examiner. "That's where we
are--Figg and Broughton--Corbet--Spring?... That's your game, is it? Now
the question is, where the devil do I come in? How come you to know my
name's Thornton? That's the point!"

Now nothing would have been easier for Aunt M'riar than to say that Mrs.
Prichard had told her that her only surviving son bore this name. But
the fact is that the old lady, quite a recent experience, had for the
moment utterly vanished from her thoughts, and the man before her had
wrenched her mind back into the past. She could only think of him as the
cruel betrayer of her girlhood, none the less cruel that he had