"Very fetching," he said, leaning down to examine his stirrup leathers which he had already lengthened twice. "I've got to have Cummins punch these again," he muttered; "or am I growing queer-legged in my old age?" As he straightened up, Miss Erroll said: "Here comes Mr. Fane now--with a strikingly pretty girl. How beautifully they are mounted"--smilingly returning Fane's salute--"and she--oh! so you _do_ know her, Captain Selwyn? Who is she?" Crop raised mechanically in dazed salute, Selwyn's light touch on the bridle had tightened to a nervous clutch which brought his horse up sharply. "What is it?" she asked, drawing bridle in her turn and looking back into his white, stupefied face. "Pain," he said, unconscious that he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus--and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the pommel of his saddle. "Are you ill?" she asked; "shall we dismount? If you feel dizzy, please lean against me." "I am all right," he said coolly; and as she recovered her seat he set his horse in motion. His face had become very red now; he looked at her, then beyond her, with all the deliberate concentration of aloof indifference. Confused, conscious that something had happened which she did not comprehend, and sensitively aware of the preoccupation which, if it did not ignore her, accepted her presence as of no consequence, she permitted her horse to set his own pace. Neither self-command nor self-control was lacking now in Selwyn; he simply was too self-absorbed to care what she thought--whether she thought at all. And into his consciousness, throbbing heavily under the rushing reaction from shock, crowded the crude fact that Alixe was no longer an apparition evoked in sleeplessness, in sun-lit brooding; in the solitude of crowded avenues and swarming streets; she was an actual presence again in his life--she was here, bodily, unchanged--unchanged!--for he had conceived a strange idea that she must have changed physically, that her appearance had altered. He knew it was a grotesquely senseless idea, but it clung to him, and he had nursed it unconsciously. He had, truly enough, expected to encounter her in life again--somewhere; though what he had been preparing to see, Heaven alone knew; but certainly not the supple, laughing girl he had known--that smooth, slender, dark-eyed, dainty visitor who had played at marriage with him through a troubled and unreal dream; and was gone when he awoke--so swift the brief two years had passed, as swift in sorrow as in happiness.