was no substitution for her in the face that her deep eyes seemed to brush with their hovering. Presently they were talking like old friends, and before long each was in possession of the principal facts concerning the other. Many things had come and gone and the common fate had pressed them hard. Her parents were dead, and her husband and her first-born children. He, on his side, had lost his mother and his wife. They matched bereavements and compared bruises, and in the way she expressed herself there was a charm which forced him, as he wondered, to remember that Fanny Knocker had at least been intelligent. "I wish I could have seen your wife--you must tell me all about her," she said. "Haven't you some portraits?" "Some poor little photographs. I'll show them to you. She was very pretty and very gentle; she was also very un-English. But she only lived a year. She wasn't clever and accomplished--like you." "Ah, me; you don't know _me!_" "No, but I want to--oh particularly. I'm prepared to give a good deal of time to the study." "We must be friends," said Mrs. Tregent. "I shall take an extraordinary interest in your daughter." "She'll be grateful for it. She's a good little reasonable thing, without a scrap of beauty." "You care greatly for that," said Mrs. Tregent. He hesitated a moment. "Don't you?" She smiled at him with her basking candour. "I used to. That's my husband," she added, with an odd, though evidently accidental, inconsequence. She had reached out to a table for a photograph in a silver frame. "He was very good to me." Maurice saw that Mr. Tregent had been many years older than his wife--a prosperous, prosaic, parliamentary person whom she couldn't impose on a man of the world. He sat an hour, and they talked of the mutilated season of their youth: he wondered at the things she remembered. In this little hour he felt his situation change--something strange and important take place: he seemed to see why he had come back to England. But there was an implication that worried him--it was in the very air, a reverberation of that old assurance of his mother's. He wished to clear the question up--it would matter for the beginning of a new friendship. Had she had any sense of injury when he took to his heels, any glimpse of the understanding on which he had begun to come to Ennismore Gardens? He couldn't find out to-day except by asking her, which, at their time of life, after so many years and consolations, would be legitimate and even amusing. When he took leave of her he held her hand a moment, hesitating; then he brought out: "Did they ever tell you--a hundred years ago--that between your mother and mine there was a great question of our marrying?" She stared--she broke into a laugh. "_Was_ there?" "Did you ever know it? Did you ever suspect it?"