“It is not impossible. Do you think I want to be a fine lady, or to tell people that I was once Evelyn Strangway? I only want to live upon the soil I love—and to see you, sometimes, as you go past my door. There is the West Lodge, now—one of the most picturesque old cottages in England. I loved it when I was a girl. Sally Newton and I used to picnic there, when my father and I were not on speaking terms. Who is living in that cottage now?”
“One of the gardeners.”
“Turn out the gardener and let me live there.”
He rejected the idea as preposterous, degrading, that she should live at the lodge gates, she who had once been the Squire’s daughter.
“Do not talk to me of degradation,” she answered, bitterly. “There will be no degradation for me in living at your gates, now that you and I are strangers. My degradation belongs to the past. Nothing in the future can touch me. I am nameless henceforward, a nullity.”
“But if you should be recognized there?”
“Who is there to recognize me? Do you think there is one line or one look of Evelyn Strangway’s sixteen-year-old face left in my face to-day?”
Knowing the portrait in the hall at Cheriton he was fain to confess that the change was complete. It would have been difficult for any one to find the lines of that proud young beauty in the careworn features and sunken cheeks of the woman who stood before him now. The months that had gone by since their parting had aged her as much as if they had been years.
“If your husband should find you there?”
“Not likely! It is the very last place in which he would look for me; and the chances are against his ever returning to England.”