Mrs. Vandeleur met this declaration with a smile, which was courteous rather than cordial, merely acknowledging, as of right, the propriety of the aspiration, treating it as quite conventional. The simplicity of the gesture testified eloquently of the discipline of twenty years; only a woman would have detected the shadow of apprehension in her eyes, the trembling of the hands which seemed so placidly occupied. Her mind was already anxiously on the alert, racing rapidly over the now familiar ground which she had quartered of late so heedfully. For her, his words were ominous; it was of Dorothy surely that he wished to speak, and yet----! In the stress of expectation her thoughts took strange flights, following vague clues fantastically. The inveterate habit of retrospection carried her back, in spite of her scruples; her honest desire to think singly of Dorothy, regarding the fortune of her own life as irrevocably settled, impelled her irresistibly to call to the stage of her imagination a scene which she had often set upon it, a duologue, entirely fictive, which might, but for her perversity, have been enacted--twenty years ago. Sir Geoffrey rose, and stood leaning with one hand on the back of his chair. This interruption--or perhaps it was the sound of oars and voices which floated in growing volume from the river--served to recall his companion to the present. The silence, of brief duration actually, seemed intolerable. She must break it, and when she spoke it was to name her daughter, aimlessly. “Dorothy?” repeated Sir Geoffrey, as she paused. “She is extraordinarily like you were before I went away. Not that you are changed--it is delightful to come back and find you the same. It’s only when she is with you that I can realise that there is a difference, a----” “I was never so good as Dorothy,” put in Mrs. Vandeleur quickly; “she will never have the same reason to blame herself----I don’t think you could imagine what she has been to me.” “I think I can,” said Sir Geoffrey simply. Then he added, rather shyly: “Really, we seem to be very good friends already: it’s very nice of her--it would be so natural for her to--to resent the intrusion of an old fellow like me.” “You need not be afraid of that; she looks upon you as--as a friend already.” “Thank you!” murmured the other. “And you think she might grow to--to like me, in time?” Mrs. Vandeleur nodded mutely. Sir Geoffrey followed for a moment the deliberate entry and re-entry of her needle, reflectively; then, as his eyes wandered, he realised vaguely that a boat had reached the landing-stage, and that people were there: he recognised young Wilgress and Miss Vandeleur.