Oh, no, it was a very different man to whom her promise had been given. Somebody who was humble and fervent, not cold and mocking. Somebody who loved her very much, not somebody who despised her. She turned and looked at Felix. Having made her as comfortable as he could, he was seated in his corner reading a Russian newspaper. He had asked her just such questions as seemed necessary, but no more. He had not, in so many words, asked her whether she were engaged to Denzil. Apparently he accepted as final the letter she had written to him. She began thinking, striving to remember exactly what she had said in that letter. And as she gazed at him, at the firm line between his lips, the squareness of his jaw, the breadth of his well-modeled forehead, she thought that had he come in person to claim her, instead of writing, she would hardly have found courage to say him nay. In a sudden access of indignation she resolved not to let her mind dwell upon a person who, evidently, was not concerning himself with her at all. She turned her eyes upon the ribbon of road that wriggled like a snake before them, away into the unknown. She marked the glowing sun move downward toward the west. She watched the gesticulations of the uncouth driver, and the lines of the far horizon. How would she have been feeling had the evening been stealing down upon her all alone in the wild plain, with that man as her sole companion? She knew that she should not have dared to close her eyes. She felt thankful that she had met Felix before seeing Denzil--before the brothers had met. Yet now that she saw her former lover, she found him so unlike her memory of him, that it was almost like beginning all over again with a stranger. Yet not quite. That glittering vein of vivid memory which danced before her eyes in the dull rock of the past--surely he shared it? How much--how little did he remember? As the slow hours rolled by she began to wonder whether he meant to send her altogether to Coventry. He was now no longer reading his paper, but sat gazing upon the distance with fixed eyes, and lips so firmly folded that it seemed they could never unclose. She felt that at all costs she must break this weird silence. It was charged with too much feeling. "David," she said, pitifully, "talk to me a little." He turned slowly towards her. His eyes rested upon her face, severely critical, she thought. "My conversation can be of very little interest to you, Miss Leigh, I fear. We live quite out of the world at Savlinsky." "But," said Rona, battling with a most unusual sensation of being snubbed, "the news we last heard of you was such as to cause us profound anxiety"--she snipped her sentence off short, because of the satirical curve of the young man's lips. "That is surprising, though gratifying," he said, with irony. "But I have no adventures to recount to you. I have spent the last month and more in prison."