He knew that he ought to cry out—tell her that it was he, her husband, David Banfield, who was there, and not the stranger whom she had apparently been expecting; but though he opened his lips, no word would come.
At last the door swung open quickly, and for a moment Banfield saw her face, lit up by that touch of wholly innocent coquetry of which your pretty Irishwoman seems to have the secret.
Then, as suddenly she realised the identity of the tall man standing between her and the window, a peculiar—to Banfield a very terrible—change of expression stiffened Rosaleen's face into watchful fear and attention.
"What is it?" she asked. "Tell me quickly, David! Is Rosy ill, or—or dead?"
"Rosy?" he stammered. "She's all right. I heard this morning——"
"—And I yesterday," she breathed quickly. Then she sat down, and Banfield let his eyes rest on her with a painful, yearning scrutiny.
He had thought to find her altered, coarsened by the experience he believed her to have gone through, but she had the same look of delicate, rather frigid refinement, which had first attracted him. He noted the perfection of her delicate profile, the determined, well-shaped mouth,—then saw with a pang that there were a few threads of white in the dark curly hair which, with her bright blue eyes, had always been Rosaleen's principal beauties; and yet she looked scarcely older than on the day he had last seen her—that on which he had accompanied her with a heavy heart to the station at Market Dalling to see her off to London.
Now, looking at her, it stabbed him to remember how even then she had shown an almost childish joy in leaving him. She had put her arms round his neck and kissed him in sign of gratitude. "It's kind of you to let me go, Dave!" she had whispered. He had often thought of those last words, the last he had heard her speak. Now he again remembered them. Alas! alas! why had he let her go?
She sat, looking away from him, her eyes fixed on the empty grate.
"You frightened me," she said plaintively. "Why did you come here, David, and frighten me like this? Why have you come here at all after—after what you did to me?"