Motionless, and without showing a sign of pleasure, she stood before him, and did not even stretch out her hand to him. "Johanna!" he cried, and was going to embrace her. But she only offered him her forehead to kiss slowly and unwillingly as if performing a great sacrifice, and it seemed to him that she shuddered under the touch of his lips. This was the reception his pet sister, his childhood's companion, chose to give him after a separation of six years. He tried with his ready humour to master the situation. "I have gone through a lot, Hannah, since I saw you last," he said laughing. "I have been received in various odd ways in different parts of the globe. With bullets, with poisoned arrows, with rotten eggs, with sour mare's milk, and I don't know what else. But such a welcome as this is altogether novel in my experience." Her blue-rimmed, melancholy eyes, sunk deeply in her thin haggard face, gazed at him gloomily and searchingly. "You have been away a long time," she said, and sat down. "Yes; that is true." "And you have kept your splendid health and spirits." "Yes; I have kept in capital health, thank you." There was a pause. He regarded her more and more as a stranger. A grim, inscrutable stoniness seemed to have frozen her nature. She had evidently nursed and cultivated an old grief with an egoism that had become fanatical. And then, as he recalled all the vanished splendour of her beauty, and looked at the emaciated throat and angular shoulders which made the flatness of her bust the more apparent, pity and his old love for her gained the upper hand. What must she have suffered to have so changed in appearance? "We can't go on like this, Hannah," he said. "If I have done anything to displease you, speak out and let us make it up." For a moment a kindlier glance shot from her eyes. But he fancied it meant that she pitied him, and so he was not reassured. However, he did not wish to rely on conjecture. He would try and put things on the old hearty footing between them. "Look here!" he said, "it is plain that your soul is cherishing some old grudge. You and I always held to one another. Can't you feel the old confidence in me again? Tell me what your trouble is, and see if I can't heal the wound." "It seems to me that you stand in greater need of healing than I do," she answered, without taking her sphinx-like eyes off him. "How so?" he asked, and plunged his hands into his trouser-pockets, stretching his legs wide apart as he planted himself in front of her. "I have often asked myself, Leo, what sort of man you would come back. I hoped you might appear before us serious and subdued, a little burdened by the consciousness of what you had brought upon yourself and us. Often enough I have prayed God that it might be so. But instead you are--are---- Aye, what you are any one can see with half an eye." "Well, what am I?" he asked, hardening into an attitude of scoffing amusement.