"Though Bertie is not an old friend," he says, smiling, "yet I have come across one here to-day--she opened the door to me; I should have liked to shake hands with her, only she looked so haughty--she never used to look haughty at the Moat." "Do you mean nurse?" she asks. "Yes, I knew her in an instant; she is not in the least changed, less even"--hesitating a little, as if doubtful whether the stiffness of their new relations warranted a personality--"less even than you." She snatches a hasty look at him, a look upon which he sees, to his surprise, imprinted a character of almost fear. "You must be laughing at me," she says, in a voice in which he detects an undoubted tremor; "I am very much changed." There is such obvious apprehension in her whole manner, that his one thought--after a first flash of astonishment--is to reassure her. "Of course I was only speaking of externals," he says quickly; "ten years could hardly be expected to leave any of us quite where we were as to our inner selves;" then, seeing her still look flurried, and becoming himself nervous, he adds, rather stupidly, the hackneyed Swinburnian couplet-- "'Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives!' though I never could see that that was quite a necessary alternative!" Ere the words are out of his mouth she has risen with precipitation, and begun hurriedly to re-arrange the branches of lilac in a scaldino on the table near her. She is apparently so awkward about it that one odorous white bough falls out on the floor. Before Jim can stoop to pick it up, Byng has rushed to the rescue. In eagerly thanking him, in receiving it back from him, and accepting his services in replacing it among its perfumed brothers, the girl, perhaps involuntarily, turns her back upon her former interlocutor, who sits for a moment staring rather blankly at her, and wondering what sting there could have lurked in his apparently harmless words to drive her away so abruptly. Whatever may have driven her away, there is certainly no doubt as to her being gone. Nor as Jim sees her moving about the room, followed by Byng, and showing him her treasures--the little wild red and yellow tulips she plucked in the field this morning; the chicken-skin box she bought at Ciampolini's yesterday, and mixing all that she shows with her delicate light laughter--can he buoy himself up with any reasonable hope of her ever, with her own good will, returning. He must be looking more blank than he is conscious of, for Mrs. Le Marchant's voice sounds quite apologetic in his ears, when, having been, like himself, deserted by her companion, she takes a seat near him. "Elizabeth is so proud of her bargains," she says, glancing with a lenient smile towards her daughter; "she must show them to everybody." "She never offered to show them to me," replies Jim, rather morosely; then, becoming aware of the almost puerile jealousy evidenced by his last remark, he adds: