"Oh, yes;--er--that is, I know where it is. I passed it one morning a long time ago." "While we were living there?" "Yes." Silence again for one entire square and part of another. Then she said, "How did you know it was our house?" He laid hold of his courage and told the truth. "I met your father a block or two down the avenue and I was hoping I might come upon the place where you lived. I found it. You were on the veranda, tying up the new shoots of a climbing rose." "My 'Marechal Niel,'" she said. "It is dead now; they let it freeze last winter." He held his peace for a time, but the rejoinder strove for speech, and had it, finally. "The memory of it lives," he said. "I shall always see you as I saw you that morning, whatever comes between. You had on some sort of a dress that reminded me of the old Greek draperies, and you were standing on the arm of a big chair." They were at the gate, and she let him open it for her. Bartrow and Myra were waiting for them at the veranda step. He realized that the ground was no longer safe, and would have taken his leave at the door. But Dick protested vigorously. "No, you don't--drop out again like a ship in a fog. We've been laying for you, Uncle Steve and I, ever since you absconded last summer, and you don't get away this time without taking your medicine. Run him in there, Connie, and hang on to him while I go get my slippers and a cigar." "There" was the cozy library, with a soft-coal fire burning cheerily in the grate, and the book-lined walls inviting enough to beckon any homeless one. But Jeffard was far beyond any outreaching of encompassments inviting or repellent. Constance drew up a chair for him before the fire, but he stood at the back of it and looked down upon her. "Miss Elliott, there is something that I should like to tell you about--if it is far enough in the past," he said, when they were alone. She was sitting with clasped hands, and there was a look in her eyes in the swift upglancing that he could not fathom. So he waited for her to give him leave. "Is it about Mr. Lansdale?" she asked. "Yes. I was with him up to the last, and I thought that--that you might like to know what I can tell you." She gave him liberty, and he told the story of the jaunt afield, dwelling chiefly on the day-to-day improvement in Lansdale's health, and stumbling a little when he came to speak of their last evening together. "It was a hard blow for me," he said, at the end of it, and his voice was low and unsteady with emotion. "You know what had gone before--what I had lost and couldn't regain; and having failed at all points I had hoped to succeed in this: to bring him back to you sound and well. And when the possibility was fairly within reach it was taken out of my hands forever." She was silent for a little time, fighting a sharp battle with reticence new-born and masterful. When she spoke it was as one who is constrained to walk with bare feet in a thorny path of frankness.