'Then I am glad you did not know. I have wanted to meet you and talk with you. And, after all, that proves me to be charitable; for people generally dislike and avoid those whom they have injured.' 'Without calling your charity into question, Mrs. Amidon,' said Geoffrey, 'I may be permitted to relieve you from the burden of supposing that you have injured me. I should put it upon another ground--that we are apt to shun those who have benefited us. In an indirect way I may have benefited you, by keeping you occupied until Mr. Amidon was ready to come forward.' She was looking at him while he spoke with her head a little on one side, her scarlet lips occasionally moving slightly. Now her eyelids drooped, and she sighed. 'I have looked forward to this meeting often,' she said, 'and I was prepared to hear you say worse things than that. Perhaps, after all, you have not cared so much as I thought you would. I have no heart to fight with you, Geoffrey, as we used to fight in----' She paused. Her persistence in calling him Geoffrey produced an effect upon him. The sound penetrated far into him, and set vibrating chords which long neglect had scarcely rendered less sensitive. He was further disturbed by her not attempting to defend herself: not that anything could make her conduct defensible, but the blow that provokes no return loses half its virtue to the striker. And, finally, it must be confessed that her aspect and propinquity were not without their influence. She was more fully developed, more beautiful than when he saw her last; and there were slight modifications in her manner and expression which were on the side of gentleness and sadness, and which moved Geoffrey to unwilling sympathy. Perhaps she had suffered enough to conciliate even his resentment. 'What do you think of Mr. Amidon?' she enquired presently. 'I have not had much opportunity of judging; but I should think,' said Geoffrey, with diminishing bitterness, 'that he would be a very suitable husband for you.' It struck him as peculiar that Ellice, in spite of her culpability towards himself, did not shrink from meeting his eyes, or from introducing topics of conversation which might have been supposed at least as unwelcome to her as to him. But hers had always been a strange and unaccountable character. She opened and closed her fan, glanced out of the window towards the sunlit lawn, then back at him, and said: 'Do you want to--leave me?' A minute before Geoffrey had fancied that he did wish to leave her; now, for some reason, he changed his mind, and dropped into a chair opposite her. 'What do you want of me?' he asked. 'Do I look the same to you as when you saw me last?' 'You look better than you did then--handsomer--and you are more expensively dressed. And, of course, the fact that you are one of the leaders and ornaments of society has its effect upon me.'