aking for
my sake, but when I saw her every doubting fled.

I do not know how she was dressed, beyond that it served but to
heighten her queenly beauty; which, rare as I remembered it, had
now grown and developed beyond all my faint conceptions. Her amber
hair had deepened into the richest auburn, its colour was undisguised
by powder, and its abundance undistorted by the art of the
hair-dresser. Her eyes were steady, and clear, and truthful; every
line of her face had rounded out the promise of her youth, and her
shape and carriage were divine. She moved like a goddess.

"Margaret," I said, as I advanced towards her, forgetting all the
openings I had so carefully rehearsed, "I can scarce believe I am
awake. It seems incredible I should speak face to face with you
here."

"It is indeed a strange meeting," she returned. The words were
nothing, but they were spoken in a tone of perfect quiet and control,
without any trace of the emotion that broke my voice and dissipated
my self-possession.

"It is a meeting for which I have dreamed, but tried not to hope,"
I said, with much feeling.

"And I had lived for nothing else," she returned, with unfaltering
voice and the same absence of emotion.

"Then, Margaret, it has come at last!" I cried, joyously, the
temporary cloud passing as she spake.

"No, it has not!" she said, with the coldest decision, and, with
that incongruity of thought which springs upon us at the most
inopportune moments, I wondered if every woman for whom I cared
was to change her whole nature, the moment I left her side. I
remembered Lucy, and now here was Margaret, whom I had known as
the embodiment of impulsive affection, fencing with a coolness that
enforced my admiration. I saw she had fully prepared herself, and
instantly I resolved to change my ground.

"Margaret," I said, falling back on the most unstudied tones at my
command, "it was only yesterday I learned from Gaston the true
reason of your presence here. We have both suffered too cruelly
from the accidents of the past to risk any misunderstanding now
for the want of perfect openness between us."

"That is what I desire above all things in the world," she answered.

"Then let us begin at the beginning. Why was it you never let me
know of your plan?"

"I do not hold that any explanation is due on my part," she replied,
still in the same tone of self-possession. "Remember I did not
seek this interview, and I do not see that you have a