And so it was in Lady Meltoun's drawing-room that they met again, after those few minutes in the pine plantation which had given color and passion to her life, and which had formed an epoch in his. Neither were unmindful of the fact that if they were not exactly the centre of observation, they were still liable to it in some degree, and their greeting was as conventional as it well could have been. After all, she thought, why should it be otherwise? There had never a word of love passed between them--only those few fateful moments of tragic intensity, when all words and thoughts had been merged in a deep reciprocal consciousness which nothing could have expressed. He stood before her, holding her hand in his for a moment longer than was absolutely necessary, and looking at her intently. It was a gaze from which she did not shrink, more critical than passionate, and when he withdrew his eyes he looked away from her with a sigh. "You have been living!" he said. "Tell me all about it!" She moved her skirts to make room for him by her side. "Sit down!" she said, "and I will try." He obeyed, but when she tried to commence and tell him all that she had felt and thought, she could not. Until that moment she scarcely realized how completely her life had been moulded by his influence. It was he who had first given her a glimpse of that new world of thought and art, and almost epicurean culture into which she had made some slight advance during his absence, and it was certain vague but sweet recollections of him which had lived with her and flowed through her life--a deep undercurrent of passion and poetry, throwing a golden halo over all those new sensations--which had raised her existence, and her ideals of existence on to a higher level. How could she tell him this? The time might come when she could do so, and if ever it did come, she knew that it would be the happiest moment of her life. But it was not yet. "Tell me a little of yourself," she said evasively. "You have been traveling, have you not?" "Yes, I have been traveling a little!" he answered. "In Spain I was taken ill, and Lady Meltoun was kind to me. That is why I am here." "But you do not say how it was that you were taken ill," she said, her cheeks suddenly glowing. "You saved her son's life. We saw all about it in the papers, but of course we did not know that it was you. It was splendid!" "If you saw it in the papers at all, depend upon it, it was very much exaggerated!" he answered quietly. "Your father received my letter, I suppose?" "Yes; the cottage has been shut up, just as you desired. Are you ever coming to take possession again?" "I hope so--some day--and yet I do not know. There are strange things in my life, Miss Thurwell, which every now and then rise up and drive me away into aimless wanderings. Life has no goal for me--it cannot have. I stand for ever on the brink of a precipice."