No answer came. Naturally he should not have been surprised at this; and yet he felt a little checked, even though she had only refrained from volunteering a reply that was not demanded. At eight, the hour fixed by himself, he crossed over and was passively admitted by the servant. Mrs. Frankland, as she called herself, received him in the large music-and-dancing room on the first-floor front, and not in any private little parlour as he had expected. This cast a distressingly business-like colour over their first meeting after so many years of severance. The woman he had wronged stood before him, well-dressed, even to his metropolitan eyes, and her manner as she came up to him was dignified even to hardness. She certainly was not glad to see him. But what could he expect after a neglect of twenty years! ‘How do you do, Mr. Millborne?’ she said cheerfully, as to any chance caller. ‘I am obliged to receive you here because my daughter has a friend downstairs.’ ‘Your daughter—and mine.’ ‘Ah—yes, yes,’ she replied hastily, as if the addition had escaped her memory. ‘But perhaps the less said about that the better, in fairness to me. You will consider me a widow, please.’ ‘Certainly, Leonora . . . ’ He could not get on, her manner was so cold and indifferent. The expected scene of sad reproach, subdued to delicacy by the run of years, was absent altogether. He was obliged to come to the point without preamble. ‘You are quite free, Leonora—I mean as to marriage? There is nobody who has your promise, or—’ ‘O yes; quite free, Mr. Millborne,’ she said, somewhat surprised. ‘Then I will tell you why I have come. Twenty years ago I promised to make you my wife; and I am here to fulfil that promise. Heaven forgive my tardiness!’ Her surprise was increased, but she was not agitated. She seemed to become gloomy, disapproving. ‘I could not entertain such an idea at this time of life,’ she said after a moment or two. ‘It would complicate matters too greatly. I have a very fair income, and require no help of any sort. I have no wish to marry . . . What could have induced you to come on such an errand now? It seems quite extraordinary, if I may say so!’ ‘It must—I daresay it does,’ Millborne replied vaguely; ‘and I must tell you that impulse—I mean in the sense of passion—has little to do with it. I wish to marry you, Leonora; I much desire to marry you. But it is an affair of conscience, a case of fulfilment. I promised you, and it was dishonourable of me to go away. I want to remove that sense of dishonour before I die. No doubt we might get to love each other as warmly as we did in old times?’