"In Heaven's name, what brings _you_ here?" he asks, in a voice almost as low as her own, from intense repressed emotion. No answer. His voice has carried her back, across the gulf of Jack's death, of her own servitude and failing health, to that night when, in the starry Felton fields, she had stood by his side, his beloved, promised wife. She is silent--struggling with a strong, vile, degrading temptation to fling down her tired head upon the shoulder of Miss Blessington's affianced husband, and weep out loud. "Are you on a visit here?" he asks again, with stern brevity. "Yes," she answers, bitterly, strengthened by his tone, in which there is small kindness, and much wrath; "I am paid fifty pounds a year to visit here." "What _do_ you mean?" "I am Mr. and Mrs. Blessington's 'companion.'" "Good God! You are here _always_, then?" "Always." A pause! Against his will his eyes dwell upon her, hungry and fierce, astonished at the alteration wrought in her whom he had once thought fairest among women. Faded, wasted, forlorn, to his cost he finds that he still thinks her so. "Is this bondage to last all your life, then?" he inquires more collectedly, after a few seconds. "Until they die, or until my voice fails." "And what then?" "I must look out for some other old people, to whom I can be ears, and voice, and feet." "Good God! And what _can_ be your motive?" "One _must_ live." "I had thought the world wide enough for two people to walk apart," he says, with almost a groan. "I have entreated God that I might never look on your face again, and this is how my prayer is answered." Another pause. "Tick-tack--tick-tack--tick-tack," goes a clock in the gallery overhead. "You look extremely ill!" "Do I?" "You are wonderfully altered!" "Yes, I know it!" "What is it ails you?" "Nothing." "What does _this_ mean?"--touching her black dress with a jealous pang of fear that his innocent rival, the "lout who gave her the sixpenny Prayer Book, and inscribed his name with a crooked pin on the fly-leaf," is numbered with the dead; and that the hollow cheeks, dejected droop of the head, and crape-covered garments are for him. The tears crowd into her eyes; they know the way there so well now. She turns away, and leans against the banisters to hide them. A light breaks in upon him. He remembers that she had a brother, her girlish rhapsodies about whom used to make him rather impatient. "I see," he says, in a softer tone; "forgive me for asking." Encouraged by his voice, she lifts her face towards him with a tearful smile. "You may be satisfied, I think," she says, simply. "You have had your revenge; I have been punished almost enough." Revenge is sweet, they say; but at this moment I do not think that St. John finds it so. "You did not know that I was here?" she asks, presently. "Know it!" he repeats, passionately. "Not I. Do you suppose I would have come within a hundred miles of this house if I had known it?"