Pamela was walking in the park, with a couple of collies at her heels. The February air was keen and cold, and she was running, with her white muff held up to her pretty pink cheeks, while the dogs, both young things, full of life and of play, leapt and bounded round her.
One of them, however, attracted dangerously by the motor-car, ran barking towards it, and was only saved from annihilation by a dexterous movement on the part of the driver.
Pamela ran forward, calling the dog and scolding him, and the motor-car stopped.
“How-do-you-do, Miss Pamela?”
“Oh, Sir Harry!”
“Drive on,” said Sir Harry Archdale to the chauffeur, as he got out, and shook hands with the girl, whose sudden loss of colour betrayed the mingled feelings of shame and shy pleasure with which the meeting inspired her.
They had not met since the terrible discoveries of the trial, and tears of mortification sprang to Pamela’s eyes when she remembered the difference there was between her position when they had last met and her position now.
Then she had been one of the daughters of the rich, well-known, highly-respected Mr. Candover, well off, happy in some vague but yet dazzling future, full of hope and happiness.
Now she and Babs were outcasts, none the less that they had found kind friends; they were the daughters of a man whose name could not be uttered in their presence, they were poor, they were overwhelmed with doubt as to the future.
The young man seemed conscious of all this too, though the knowledge only served to deepen the kindly feeling with which he spoke, to fill his eyes with sympathy which he did not dare to express in words.