Does a woman never forget? It was not true perhaps as Lady Leighton said it, but it would be vain to say that Evelyn was not moved to the bottom of her heart by the sight of her former lover. He, about whom all the dreams of her youth had been woven, who had deserted her, given her up in her need, and humiliated her before all the world. To see him at all would not have been without effect upon her, but to see him so humiliated in his turn, so miserable a wreck, while she was in all the flush of a late return to youth and well-being, happy in a subdued way, and on the height of prosperity, gave her a shock of mingled feeling, perhaps more strong than any she had experienced since he rent her life in two, and covered her (as she felt) with shame. But it was not any re-awakening of the extinguished fire which moved Evelyn. She could not forget, it was true, and yet she could easily have forgotten, the relation in which she had stood to him, and her old adoration of him, at all times the visionary love of a girl, giving a hundred fictitious excellencies to the hero she had chosen. This was not what had occurred to her mind. Had she seen him in his ancient supremacy of good fortune--a well-preserved, middle-aged Adonis, smiling perhaps, as she had imagined, at her late marriage with a rich _parvenu_, keeping the superior position of a man who has rejected a love bestowed upon him, and never without that complacent sense of having “behaved badly,” which is one of the many forms of vanity--the sight would not have disturbed her, except, perhaps, with a passing sensation of anger. But to see him in his downfall gave Evelyn a shock of pain. It was too terrible to think of what he had been and what he was. Instead of the sense of retribution which her friend had suggested, Evelyn had a horrified revulsion of feeling, rebellious against any such possibility, angry lest it should be supposed that she could have desired the least and smallest punishment, or could take any satisfaction from its infliction. She would have hated herself could she have thought this possible. There is an old poem in which the story of Troilus and Cressida, so often treated by the poets in its first bloom, has an after episode, an administration of poetic justice, in which all the severity of the mediæval imagination comes forth. The false Cressida falls into deepest misery in this tragic strain, and becomes a leper, the last and most awful of degradations. And while she sits with her wretched companions, begging her miserable bread by the roadside, the injured Troilus, the true knight, rides by. Evelyn, though I do not suppose she had ever seen Henryson’s poem, felt the same anguish of pity which arose in the bosom of the noble Greek. If she could have sent in secret the richest offering, and stolen aside out of the way not to insult the sufferer even by a look, she would have done it. Her pity was an agony, but it had nothing in it akin to love.