“What a handsome face this is!” she said, controlling her own nervous agitation as well as she could, and fixing her gaze upon the picture. “I don’t think I ever saw a face I admired so much.” There was a pause, and Mabin, without looking round, heard her companion draw a deep breath. Presently, however, the latter recovered her self-possession sufficiently to ask, with an assumption of her usual playful tone: “Not--Rudolph’s?” Mabin was taken completely off her guard. Her mind filled with the story of her friend, she had for the time forgotten her own. “Oh, that is a different type of face, quite different,” she replied, relapsing at once into the formal tone of the shy school-girl. “But not without its good points?” suggested Mrs. Dale, coming behind the girl and putting her little hands on her waist. Mabin, with an inspiration of astuteness, thought she received a short cut to her friend’s confidence, a confidence which would clear the ground for further discoveries, further enlightenments. “Haven’t you ever felt that one--person--was outside everything else? And not to be measured by standards at all?” she asked in a soft, shy voice. Mrs. Dale’s answer, the answer, too, of a widow, came upon her like a thunderbolt. “No, dear. I have had no such experience myself. I have never cared for a man in all my life.” And she spoke with the accents of sincerity. CHAPTER X. THE PICKING UP OF SOME SILVER THREADS. “Mabin!” “Oh!” A single syllable hardly conveys the amount of alarm, of horror, of paralyzing fright which Mabin puts into the exclamation. And yet the occasion was an ordinary one enough. It had simply happened that she had taken her work to the old seat at the edge of the plantation, where the primitive picnics used to take place in the old days, and that Rudolph had come up softly over the fields without her hearing his footsteps on the yielding grass. “I frightened you?” “N--no, not exactly, but you made me drop my needle. I thought you were at Portsmouth!” “So I was. But that isn’t five thousand miles off. I came back this morning.” Mabin said nothing. She had not seen him for a fortnight,--not, in fact, since the morning when he had met her on the seashore, and when he had applauded her resolution of sleeping in the room in which Mrs. Dale had had her bad dream. He had been called away suddenly on the following day, and had therefore heard nothing of Mabin’s adventure. “Haven’t you got any news for me? I had rather expected a budget.” Now Mabin had a budget for him, and had been looking forward most anxiously for his return, that she might confide in him some of the suspicions, the surmises, which filled her brain by day, and even kept her awake at night. But as usual with events long looked forward to, this return of Rudolph’s had not taken place as she expected, and she found herself in a state of unreadiness to meet him.