"Ah, no!" she cried. "I did not come here to reopen an incident that has been so long closed. You love another woman, no doubt." "No," I answered. "I loved you once, until you forsook me. I have not loved since." "But I was a mere girl then," she urged. "Ours was but a midsummer madness--that you'll surely admit." I was silent. I had believed myself proof against all sentiment in this respect, for of late I had thought little, if at all, of my lost love. Yet alone with her at that moment all the bitter past flooded upon me, my wild passion and my shattered hopes, with a vividness that stirred up a great bitterness within me. Not that I loved her now. No. On the contrary, I hated her. She had played others false and treated them just as she had treated me. "After madness there is always a reaction," I answered, recollecting how fondly I had once loved her, and how, since the day we parted, my life, even Bohemian as it must ever be in journalistic London, was nevertheless loveless and misanthropic, the life of one whose hopes were shattered and whose joy in living had been sapped. Shenley was but the tomb of those summer recollections. I never now visited the place. "But all this is very foolish, Frank," she exclaimed with a calm philosophical air and a smile probably meant to be coquettish. "Why recollect the past?" "When one has loved as I once did, it is difficult to rid oneself of the memory of its sweetness or its bitterness," I said. "Your visit here has brought it all back to me--all that I have striven so long and so strenuously to forget." She sighed. For a single instant her dark eyes met mine, and then she avoided my gaze. "I ventured here," she explained in a low, apologetic tone, "because I believed that our youthful passion had mutually died, and that I might renew your acquaintance not as lover but as friend. If, by coming here, I have pained you, or caused you any particularly unhappy recollections, forgive me, Frank--forgive me," and she stretched forth her hand and placed it upon my arm with a gesture of deep earnestness and regret. "Certainly, I forgive you," I answered, annoyed with myself for having thus worn my heart on my sleeve. It was foolish, I knew. That idyllic love of ours was a mere dream of youth, like the other castles in the air we build when in our teens. It was unwise to have spoken as I had, for after all, truth to tell, I was at that moment secretly glad of my freedom. And why? Because the mysterious woman, whose beauty was perfect, yet whose very existence was an enigma, had awakened within my soul a new-born love. Since that bright morning when she had first passed me in St. James's Park my thoughts had been constantly of her. Although I had not exchanged a single word with her I loved her, and all thought of this dark-eyed woman who had once played me false had passed from me.