Julie looked up quickly.
“You mustn’t pity me,” she said. “I wouldn’t retrace one step of the past... It’s the future I would alter, if I could.”
“And how can you tell,” Mrs Lawless inquired, “what the future holds?”
The girl smiled drearily.
“I know very well what it doesn’t hold,” she answered. “That’s as far as I care to go.”
And then suddenly her wandering gaze fell on a photograph that stood in a silver frame on the piano, and she became silent, regarding it with an intensity that drew Mrs Lawless’ eyes to the object that excited her interest.
“You recognise it?” she said, and there was a quality in her voice such as Julie had never heard in any voice before. “That was taken before—he left the Army.”
It was a portrait of Lawless in regimentals, younger and handsomer than the man Julie knew; but there was lacking in the younger face something which the older face possessed. Julie could not determine what that something was.
“Yes, I recognise it... But I miss—the scar,” she said.
She blushed violently. It was the scar that had appealed so strongly to her youthful imagination. And then, raising her glance furtively to see whether her embarrassment were observed, she was profoundly disconcerted at the sight of the tears that were standing in the other woman’s eyes. Mrs Lawless moved away.