"Sybil," said Audley, after a half-minute's pause, during which he had been surveying her with fond and loving eyes, "by what singular incidence of the stars are we blessed by meeting thus!" "You may well ask, if such you feel it to be," she replied calmly, and her voice made his heart vibrate as she spoke; "yet it is simple and prosaic enough. I am here solely by the influence of misfortune." "Misfortune?" "Yes." "Oh, explain." "When poor mamma died, what was left for me but to eat the bread of dependence?--and I am a dependent now." "Sybil!" "I came to India as that which you find me." "And that is----" "The humble friend--the companion, for it is nothing more in plain English--of the Governor-General's lady. Mamma gone--Denzil, too, in Afghanistan--was I not fortunate in finding such a home?" "My poor Sybil," exclaimed Audley, gnawing his moustache and pressing her soft hand and arm against his side. Then he became silent, as the past and present, for a little, held his soul in thrall; and far from the brilliant fête of the Anglo-Indian Court his mind flashed back to other days, and he saw again only Sybil Devereaux and the purple moorland, the solemn rock-pillar, the lonely tarn, with its osier isles, the long-legged heron and the blue kingfisher amid its green reedy sedges, and in the soft sunlight the grey granite earns cast their shadows on the lee, as when he had seen her on that day when first they met; and much of shame for himself and for his father mingled with the memory and his emotion. But there was a change here! The poor, pale girl, who had so anxiously and wearily sought to sell her pencilled sketches and water-coloured drawings in the shops of the little market town, who so often with an aching heart took them back, through the mist and the rain and the wind, to the humble cottage where her mother lay dying, was now in a very different sphere, richly though modestly dressed, easy in air and bearing, perfectly self-possessed, surrounded by wealth and rank, yet with all the secret pride of her little heart, nieek, gentle, and happy in aspect. She, too, was silent for a time, during which she glanced at him covertly and timidly. "Here again was Audley," was the thought of her heart; "did he love her still? Had he truly loved her, even _then_?" was the next thought, and her heart half answered, "Yes--he had loved her, but only as the worldly love;" and this fear, this half-conviction, dashed her present joy. Yet no woman wishes to believe, or cares to admit even to herself, that the power she once exerted over a man's heart can, under any circumstances, pass altogether away. "Sybil," said he, "you, any more than I, cannot have forgotten all our past, and the scenes where we met--the wild shore, the precipices, the grey granite rocks of our own Cornwall; and that awful hour in the Pixies' Cave, too--can you have forgotten that?"