The girl showed him into the old, quiet parlour (as if he could not have found the way thither himself), and there left him. It was very still. Nothing broke the silence but the sleepy tick of the clock, and the sound of some one (Jakes, perhaps) raking gravel on the garden path. Everything was unaltered. There was the little bust of Minerva that Barbara had once adorned with a paper bonnet; the fretsaw bookcase that the two boys had made at school; and the quaint little glass-fronted cupboard, let into the panelling, from which the watch had been stolen. In the years that had passed, only one thing in the room had changed, and that was the tall figure in uniform standing on the hearthrug.
He turned to look at himself in the glass. The dark moustache, bronzed skin, red tunic with its white collar and badges of the "royal tiger;" all these things had never been reflected there before, and for the twentieth time during the last half-hour he sought to reassure himself with the thought that his disguise was complete. "She'll never recognize me!" he muttered. "It's all right." Then the door opened, and for an instant his heart seemed to stop beating.
The same easy dignity and graciousness of manner, the same sweet womanly face, and the same depths of love and ready sympathy in her clear, calm eyes. She was dressed in mourning, and at her throat was the brooch containing the locks of the children's hair. Jack noticed it at once, and saw, too, that the little silver locket still had its place among the gold trinkets on her watch chain; and the sight of it very nearly brought him down upon his knees at her feet.
She seemed smaller than ever, and now, standing in front of him, her upturned face was about on a level with the medals on his breast.
What was it made his chest heave and his lips tremble as he encountered her gaze? However foolish and headstrong he might have been in the past, he knew he had only to declare himself and it would all be forgotten and forgiven. "You may doubt us," Valentine had said, "but we have never lost faith in you." Yes, that was it; she loved her ugly duckling, believing even now that, in spite of outward appearances, it would one day turn into a swan. But the years had slipped away, and the change had never taken place. She might hope that it had, and it was best that she should never know the truth.
With a set face he began to speak.
"I've lately returned from Egypt, and saw there your nephew, Lieutenant Fenleigh, of the ——sex Regiment."
He tried to say "ma'am," but even at that moment it seemed too great a mockery, and the word choked him.
"I was with him when he died on the banks of the Nile. He asked me to bring you this, and to give it to you with my own hands."
She took the ring, but without moving her eyes from the speaker's face.