“Well, she was there then.”
“But I should have seen her if she had been.”
She turned slowly round on me, with deep, kind eyes. “Would you? You could see all the time?”
I had forgotten that. There had been two months when I hadn’t seen at all. Any one might have come and gone during that time.
Remarking on the inconvenience of having no list of passengers, I asked my companion if she knew the young lady’s name.
“No; but I can inquire of my friends. They may know.”
Having crossed to speak to the nurses on the other side of the deck, she came back without the information.
“But Miss Prynne,” she added, “that’s the short one, says that the young lady came over about two years ago with Lady Rideover’s sister, Miss Melbury, of Montreal.”
I withdrew to ponder. I had been in continuous if desultory communication with my sisters during all my time abroad, and no mention of Regina Barry had ever escaped either. I had not supposed that they knew one another. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had been under the same roof with her at Taplow and had not been aware of it. And here she was on board the ship on which I was returning home, and able to come to my aid at a minute when I wanted help.
I had often wished that some of my New York correspondents would speak of her, but no one ever had. Except in the case of Cantyre this was hardly strange, for—apart from Hilda Grace, who never wrote to me—no one knew that Regina Barry and I had meant anything to each other. If Cantyre had spoken of her, it would have been on his own account; but confidential as he was in private talk, his letters were never more than a few terse lines. So I had rather bitterly imagined her as going on with the testing of other men, as she had tested Jim Hunter, Cantyre, and me—trying them and finding them wanting. In ungenerous moments I went so far as to hope that Nemesis might overtake her in some tremendous passion in which she herself would be tried and tossed aside.