In this room the husband and his newly found wife were shut up together. Mr Boyd looked five years older than he had looked a few hours previously. He was very pale. A certain hardness in the lines of his mouth, unnoticed before, now made itself plainly observable. His brows were contracted; all the gladness, all the softness had died out of his dark eyes as completely as if they had never had an existence there. He was sitting at a table, poring over some railway maps and time-tables. On a sofa, separated from him by half the length of the room, sat his wife. She was a tall, dark, shapely woman, who had left her thirtieth birthday behind her some years ago. She had a profusion of black hair, and very bright black eyes, with a certain cold, clear directness of gaze in them, which for some men seemed to have a sort of special charm. Certainly, they looked like eyes that could never melt with sympathy or be softened by tears. She had a long Grecian nose, and full red lips; but her chin was too heavy and rounded for the rest of her face. Her clear youthful complexion owed probably as much to art as it did to nature; but it was art so skilfully applied as sometimes to excite the envy of those of her own sex to whom such secrets were secrets no longer. In any case, most men conceded that she was still a very handsome woman, and it was not likely that she was unaware of the fact. She sat for a little while tapping impatiently with one foot on the carpet, and glancing furtively at the impassive face bent over its books and maps, which seemed for the time to have forgotten that there was any such person as she in existence. At length she could keep silent no longer. ‘You do not seem particularly delighted by the return of your long-lost wife, who was saved from shipwreck by a miracle. Many men would be beside themselves with joy; but you are a philosopher, and know how to hide your feelings. _Eh bien!_ if you are not overjoyed to see me, I am overjoyed to see you; and I love you so very dearly, that I will never leave you again.’ Only a slight foreign accent betrayed the fact that she was not an Englishwoman. Oscar Boyd took no more notice of her than if she had been addressing herself to the empty air. She rose and crossed the room to the fireplace, and glanced at herself in the glass. There was a dangerous light in her eyes. ‘If he does not speak to me, I shall strike him!’ she said to herself. Then aloud: ‘I have travelled six thousand miles in search of you, and now that I have found you, you have not even one kiss to greet me with! What a heart of marble yours must be!’ Still the impassive figure at the table made no more sign than if it had been carved in stone.