"Quite warm."
"Good-night, then. Stay. Tell me"—he spoke rapidly, and with much agitation—"tell me just one thing, and I will never trouble you again. Why did you not answer a letter I wrote to you seventeen years ago?"
"I never got any letter. I never had one word from you after the Sunday you bade me good-by, promising to write."
"And I did write," cried he, passionately. "I posted it with my own hands. You should have got it on the Tuesday morning."
She leaned against the laurel bush, that fatal laurel bush, and in a few breathless words told him what David had said about the hidden letter.
"It must have been my letter. Why did you not tell me this before?"
"How could I? I never knew you had written. You never said a word. In all these years you have never said a single word."
Bitterly, bitterly he turned away. The groan that escaped him—a man's groan over his lost life—lost, not wholly through fate alone—was such as she, the woman whose portion had been sorrow, passive sorrow only, never forgot in all her days.
"Don't mind it," she whispered—"don't mind it. It is so long past now."
He made no immediate answer, then said,