Then, as suddenly she realised the identity of the tall man standing between her and the window, a peculiar--to Banfield a very terrible--change of expression stiffened Rosaleen's face into watchful fear and attention. "What is it?" she asked. "Tell me quickly, David! Is Rosy ill, or--or dead?" "Rosy?" he stammered. "She's all right. I heard this morning----" "--And I yesterday," she breathed quickly. Then she sat down, and Banfield let his eyes rest on her with a painful, yearning scrutiny. He had thought to find her altered, coarsened by the experience he believed her to have gone through, but she had the same look of delicate, rather frigid refinement, which had first attracted him. He noted the perfection of her delicate profile, the determined, well-shaped mouth,--then saw with a pang that there were a few threads of white in the dark curly hair which, with her bright blue eyes, had always been Rosaleen's principal beauties; and yet she looked scarcely older than on the day he had last seen her--that on which he had accompanied her with a heavy heart to the station at Market Dalling to see her off to London. Now, looking at her, it stabbed him to remember how even then she had shown an almost childish joy in leaving him. She had put her arms round his neck and kissed him in sign of gratitude. "It's kind of you to let me go, Dave!" she had whispered. He had often thought of those last words, the last he had heard her speak. Now he again remembered them. Alas! alas! why had he let her go? She sat, looking away from him, her eyes fixed on the empty grate. "You frightened me," she said plaintively. "Why did you come here, David, and frighten me like this? Why have you come here at all after--after what you did to me?" "What I did to you?" he stammered confusedly, and there came over him the shamed fear that she had already heard of his coming marriage with Matilda Wellow. "Yes, what you did to me--the documents you sent me--divorce papers they're called----" He felt, rather than saw, that his wife's eyes were filling, brimming over with indignant tears. "We don't have those things at home--in Ireland, I mean. And then reading out my letter--the mad letter I sent you--before a lot of men!" Rosaleen had always possessed the wifely art of being able to make David Banfield feel himself in the wrong, and now, on hearing her last words, the man before her told himself with a pang that he had indeed acted in an unkind, even an unmanly, fashion to the fragile-looking woman who sat with her face averted from him. "I thought--of course I thought"--he plucked up courage as he spoke--"that you wanted to be free. You said you hoped I should forget you."