"Well, Mrs. Wyllard, has your hero-worship been satisfied? Have you seen enough of the temple which once enshrined your god?" said Heathcote lightly.
"Yes, I have been very much gratified; and I must thank Mr. Blümenlein for his kindness and consideration."
The merchant protested that he had rarely enjoyed so great a privilege as that which Mrs. Wyllard had afforded him; and with exchange of courtesies they parted, on the threshold of the outer office.
Heathcote and Dora walked to the hotel together. It was not a long walk, and it took them only by crowded streets and busy thoroughfares, where anything like earnest conversation was impossible. And yet Edward Heathcote could but remember that it was the first time they two had walked together since Dora had been his plighted wife. Ah, how cruel a pang it gave him to recall those old days, and to remember all she had been to him, all she might have been, had Fate used him more kindly!
He stole a look at the beautiful face as they walked slowly across the Place Vendôme. Yes, she was no less lovely than of old; her beauty had ripened, not changed. There was a more thoughtful look, there were traces even of care and sorrow; but those indications only heightened the spirituality of the face.
O, what worship, what devotion he could have given her now in the bloom of her womanhood, in the maturity of his manhood—such whole-hearted, thoughtful love as youth can never give! And it was not to be. They were to be apart for ever, they two. They were to be strangers; since this assumption of friendship, to which he had tried to reconcile himself, was, after all, but a mockery. Chivalrous feeling might keep his thoughts pure, his honour unspotted; but in his heart of hearts he loved his first love as passionately as in the days of his youth.
And to-day, for the first time, he had heard her husband address her coldly and curtly, with a touch of anger even.
He was not likely to forget that curt, impatient tone, and the frown that had accentuated it.
"I was very glad to get your letter," she said presently. "Tell me once more with your own lips that you have ceased to suspect my cousin."
"Ceased to suspect would, perhaps, be too strong an expression. But in the discoveries I have made relating to that murdered girl there is certainly nothing that in any way points to Mr. Grahame."