Nina chose the end of a couch, and faced him over its piled pillows, on which, half-reclining, she rested her arms. To her own amazement, now that she was with him alone, all her fear had gone. Her poise and address were perfect.
Yet the change that had been wrought in him since the Monday she parted from him at Bellingdown struck her to the heart.
He must have lost twenty pounds in weight. His clothes, then so well-fitting, hung on his almost gaunt frame. His cheeks were hollow, and his eyes gleamed with that odd, lurid, uncanny light from deepening sockets.
"If I had known you came to Bath I should surely have seen you," she said.
"They told me you saw no one," he returned, "and yet you had your lover there at that moment."
"You know I have no lover—that I never have had."
"Why quibble over terms?" he asked. "I saw you in his arms in India. I saw you in his arms to-day. That's enough for me."
"He did me a great service," she tried to explain. "I didn't even know he was in Bath. It was my surgeon who brought him. He gave the skin that restored my poor burned face."
Her visitor chuckled cynically.
"You hadn't any poor burned face at Umballa," he sneered. "What had he sacrificed there?"