"Yes, sir—very happy, Mr. Strangways; so am I. Did not know you were in this part of the world, Mr. Strangways, sir. You remember Havre, sir?"
"Perfectly—yes. You did not know me by the name of Varbarriere, which name I adopted on purchasing the Varbarriere estates shortly after I met you at Havre, on becoming a naturalised subject of France."
"Wonderful little changed, Monsieur Barvarrian—fat, sir—a little stouter—in good case, Mr. Strangways; but six years, you know, sir, does not count for nothing—ha, ha, ha!"
"You have the goodness to flatter me, I fear," answered Varbarriere, with a smile somewhat contemptuous, and in his deep tones of banter.
"This is my friend, Mr. Strangways, if he'll allow me to call him so—Mr. Herbert Strangways, Sir Jekyl," said the polite attorney, presenting his own guest to the Baronet.
"And so, Monsieur Varbarriere, I find I have an additional reason to rejoice in having made your acquaintance, inasmuch as it revives a very old one, so old that I almost fear you may have forgotten it. You remember our poor friend, Guy Deverell, and—"
"Perfectly, Sir Jekyl, and I was often tempted to ask you the same question; but—but you know there's a melancholy—and we were so very happy here, I had not courage to invite the sadness of the retrospect, though a very remote one. I believe I was right, Sir Jekyl. Life's true philosophy is to extract from the present all it can yield of happiness, and to bury our dead out of our sight."
"I dare say—I'm much of that way of thinking myself. And—dear me!—I—I suppose I'm very much altered." He was looking at Varbarriere, and trying to recover in the heavy frame and ponderous features before him the image of that Herbert Strangways whom, in the days of his early coxcombry, he had treated with a becoming impertinence.
"No—you're wonderfully little changed—I say honestly—quite wonderfully like what I remember you. And I—I know what a transformation I am—perfectly," said Varbarriere.
And he stood before Sir Jekyl, as he would display a portrait, full front—Sir Jekyl held a silver candlestick in his hand, Monsieur Varbarriere his in his—and they stood face to face—in a dream of the past.