She thought that he never looked so handsome as he did then, in his smart hussar tunic—blue, faced with red and braided with yellow. Club drill and sword exercise had developed every muscle, while setting-up drill and the riding-school had given him that air and bearing our light cavalrymen alone possess.
'Why cast away thus your prospects in life?' she asked, sadly.
'I have none—I lost them with you.'
'What dear friends we might have been—nay, were, if with friendship you would have been content, Robert!'
'A view you only adopted after Sir Redmond Sleath came.'
Her pale face coloured deeply, and perhaps guiltily, at this response, and he regarded her earnestly. She was pale certainly, and her lips had a pathetic little droop in them, though their wonderful sweetness of expression yet remained, but her cheeks had lost some of their girlish roundness and bloom.
The atmosphere of most unclassic Paddington, with its frowsy canal and fœtid churchyard, was truly somewhat different from the breeze that swept the Ochil ranges and down through the Birks of Invermay.
Robert realised at that moment how dear, how inexpressibly dear to him, was the girl he had lost, and between whom and himself he had now opened a complete social gulf, and how their past friendship and love had crept into his heart and settled there, making her still more precious to him than life itself.
When he spoke again his voice was strained and husky, and the tones of it were as those of a man in mortal pain.
'How is dear Mary?'