'By invitation?' asked Annabelle, aghast, conceiving that her friend Mary had formed some scheme concerning them.
'No; I have volunteered a visit to the general, out of my friendship for Cecil Falconer—or Montgomerie, we must call him now. I have seen several notices concerning him in the public prints; I know all about his changed fortunes, and I want to be of service, if I can, to him and the old general. Thus I took this train, by a singular coincidence.'
'One I would have avoided, could I have known, foreseen, what was thereby involved.'
'Do not say so, I implore you,' said he.
She made no response to this; but sat with her face resolutely turned to the carriage window, while biting her cherry nether lip, and with difficulty restraining tears of vexation behind her veil; while Fotheringhame, as he looked at her, thought just then that no woman could compare with her—not even Mary Montgomerie—in his eyes; and he longed to see her face unveiled, but dared not, in her present mood, venture to hint of such a wish.
As his presence seemed to give her such extreme annoyance, he felt half inclined to relinquish his plan of visiting Sir Piers; but then he had written to the latter, announcing his intention of coming, and had obtained two or three days' leave for that special purpose.
The recent tidings of Cecil in the public prints—the brilliant exploit he had performed in the war in Servia—'in Servia, of all places in the world,' as Fotheringhame said—fortunately gave this luckless pair of travellers a kind of neutral ground on which to meet—a neutral subject on which to converse, apart from themselves; but in no instance can a man and a woman who have ever been more to each other than friends meet, after parting under any circumstances, without having emotion of a deeper kind—be it love, or be it hate—than ordinary individuals. Thus, ever and anon the conversation of these two manifested a decided tendency to take a personal and explanatory turn; yet they sat rigidly apart, each in their own corner of the carriage.
'Poor Cecil!' said Fotheringhame; 'he may have tired of treading life's dull road ere the report of his good fortune reaches him—the heir of an old baronetcy and an estate.'
'With the affection of a dear girl like Mary Montgomerie too!'
'True,' added Fotheringhame, with much sadness of tone; 'she does not forget, as some so readily can, what Motherwell calls "the love of life's young day."