Dudley's face flushed more deeply.
"I think we had both risen pretty well above the need of words that night," he said, with a nervous laugh. "When an electric spark passes between two spheres—— You see, I was weighed down by the feeling that I had wasted my life; this London course was a sort of atonement; and I would not ask a woman to be my wife till I had at least left all schoolboy work behind me. But that night I forgot myself."
"And when you met her next——?"
"I left Borrowness the next day." Dudley's lip curled. "Our next meeting was a fine dramatic tableau at Burlington House, a modern version of the sudden transformation of Cinderella."
"But you had written to her?"
Dudley shook his head. "I had told her—before that night—that I should not be a free man till my examination was over in July. She was so quick; she always seemed to understand. But when I went down to Borrowness, half mad with longing for her—her cousin had gone to America, and Miss Maclean, I was told, was starting for Switzerland with a party of friends!"
"Did you write to her then?"
"I did not know her address. And it was no use writing about a thing like that. Then came my aunt's long illness. She was the best friend I had in the world, and she died."
He paused, and resumed with a sudden change of tone, "Miss Maclean told me her name was Margaret."
"Margaret is her second name."