Berrington made no reply for the moment. He was looking at the pale features of his companion with something like a lovelight in his eyes. Looked at closely it was a beautiful face, despite its sorrow and the grey hair that crowned it. Berrington recollected the grey lady as a merry laughing girl, who seemed not to have
a single care in the world. His mind was very far away from Audley Place at that moment.
"How long since we last met, Mary!" he said.
The woman sighed and her eyes filled with tears. Berrington had struck a tender cord.
"Four months, four years, four centuries!" she said with a passionate catch of her voice. "You are not angry with me, Phil? I can see you are not angry with me."
"My dearest, no. When I look at you I can feel no anger in my heart against you. My God, what you must have suffered! The same and yet so different. All your colour has gone, the laughter from your eyes, the tender lines of your mouth. And yet at the outside your years cannot be more than thirty."
"Thirty-one," the other said mournfully. "And yet I seem to have lived such a long, long life. You think that I treated you very badly, Phil?"
"My dear Mary, how could I come to any other conclusion? You were engaged to me, we were going to be married, the very hour was fixed. Then you disappeared utterly, leaving nothing more than a note to say that I was to forget you and not seek you. I was to think of you as being utterly unworthy to become a good man's wife."
"If you had done so a great deal of trouble and anxiety would have been saved, Phil."
"Yes, but I declined to do anything of the kind," Berrington said eagerly. "I knew that in some way you were sacrificing yourself for others. And when I found that your brother had gone, I felt absolutely certain of it."