"Yes," she returned, guardedly, "Moritz is certainly our cousin--once removed. When we were at Kitlands, his father, Colonel Ingram, lived abroad, so that is why you never met him. Did you not ever hear us speak of Moritz and Gwendoline." "I think not--I am sure not." But Everard's eyes were downcast as he spoke. Then, without another word, he lifted his hat and turned away; the mention of Kitlands had been like a stab. Even Althea hardly guessed how this meeting had tried him, and how cruelly his pride had suffered. Althea was very silent all the way home. She was tired, she said, and Doreen and Waveney must discuss the play without her; but as she leant back in her corner of the carriage, very little of the conversation reached her ears. Ah, she had noted all the changes now. The shiny dress-coat, the lines, the slight baldness, had all been apparent under the flaring gaslights in the lobby. She could see now that Everard was aged and altered. The spring and brightness of youth had gone, and care and disappointment and ceaseless drudgery had given him the stoop of age. Already his shoulders seemed bowed, as though some heavy load lay on them; but the face, grave and careworn as it was, was the face of her old lover. The features were as finely chiselled as ever. No sorrow, no failure, no wearing sense of humiliation, would ever rob Everard Ward of his man's beauty, though perhaps an artist would no longer desire to paint him as Ithuriel. "I am glad to have seen him again," thought Althea; but a dry sob rose in her throat as she said it. How coldly, how gravely he had accosted her! He had expressed no pleasure in meeting his old friends, had asked no single question about their welfare. A few stiff words of thanks for her kindness to Waveney, but nothing more, nothing more; and Althea's eyes grew misty with unshed tears in the darkness. There were some lines by Miss Murdoch that Everard had once written in her album. She had read them so often that she knew them by heart; they were haunting her now. "Forgotten! no, we never do forget; We let the years go; wash them clean with tears, Leave them to bleach out in the open day Or lock them careful by, like dead friends' clothes, Till we shall dare unfold them without pain; But we forget not, never can forget." "It is my nature to be faithful," Althea had once touchingly said to her sister; and to forget was certainly not possible to her! CHAPTER XXIII. ACROSS THE GOLF LINKS. "Learn to live, and live to learn, Ignorance like a fire burns, Little tasks make large returns." BAYARD TAYLOR. "Sits the wind in that quarter." SHAKESPEARE. When Waveney went home the following Sunday, she carried with her a choice little piece of information, which she retailed with much gusto at the tea-table.