"It is a month since you were here--a whole calendar month. Why didn't you bring Lady Emily to see me? But perhaps she did not wish to come. Was that so?" "No, Mrs. Wornock," he answered coldly. "My mother wished to call upon you." "And you prevented her?" "Yes." "Why did you do that?" "Dare I be frank with you?" "Yes, yes, yes! You cannot be too frank. I love you, Allan. Always remember that. You are to me as a second son." Her warmth startled and scared him. His face flushed hotly, and he stood before her in mute embarrassment. If the secret of the past was indeed the guilty secret which he had suspected, there was utter shamelessness in this speech of hers. "Allan, why are you silent?" "Because there are some things that can hardly be said; least of all by a man of my age to a woman of yours." "There is nothing that you can say to me, Allan, about myself or my regard for you, that can bring a blush to my face or to yours. There is nothing in my life of which I need be ashamed in your sight or in the sight of my son." "Forgive me, forgive me, if my secret thoughts have sometimes wronged you. There has been so much to surprise and mystify me. Your agitation on hearing my father's name; your painful embarrassment when I brought my mother here; and last, and most of all, your secret visit to Beechhurst when my father was there." "What! you know of that?" "Yes; I saw your face at the open window, looking in at him." She clasped her hands, and there were tears in her eyes. "Yes," she faltered, after a silence of some moments, "I was looking at the face I had not seen for nearly thirty years--the face that looked at me like a ghost from the past, and had no knowledge of me, no care for me. I knew--I have known in all these years that George Beresford was to be looked for among the living. I have sought for him in the spirit-world, again and again and again, in long days and nights of waiting, in my dreams, in long, far-reaching thoughts that have carried my soul away from this dull earth; but there was no answer--not a thought, not a breath out of that unseen world where my spirit would have touched his had he died while he was young, and while he still loved me. But he lived, and grew old like me, and found a new love, and so we are as wide apart as if we had never met. I stood in the darkness outside your window for nearly an hour, looking at him, listening to his voice when he spoke--the dear, kind voice! _That_ was not changed." "It is true, then? You knew and loved my father years ago?" "Yes, knew him and loved him, and would have been his wife if it had been for his happiness to marry me. Think of that, Allan! I was to have been his wife, and I gave him up for his own sake." "Why did you do that? Why should you not have married him?"