much older--older
than when he had seen her before--it might have been as an effect of her
guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more
imagination to her than to all the others put together, and had thereby
penetrated to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for. She
_was_ there on harder terms than any one; she was there as a consequence
of things suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; and
she remembered him very much as she was remembered--only a good deal
better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one of
the rooms--remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-place--out of
which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even before
they had spoken they had practically arranged with each other to stay
behind for talk. The charm, happily, was in other things too--partly in
there being scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay behind
for. It was in the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it
waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low
sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots,
old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the
way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal with the
simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down,
just take her mild attention for a part of her general business. As soon
as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing
link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its
advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. "I met you
years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed to
disappointment--she had been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he
did he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as
he called for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service now,
worked the miracle--the impression operating like the torch of a
lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-jets.
Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was
really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his
haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong. It
hadn't been at Rome--it had been at Naples; and it hadn't been eight
years before--it had been more nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with
her uncle a