She left him hastily. Profound silence fell. He turned and looked out at the fast-falling rain, at the trees swaying in the fitful wind, at the dull, leaden sky. Was he asleep and dreaming? His father alive! He sat half dazed, unable to realize it.
"Victor!"
He had not heard the door open, he had not heard her approach, but she stood beside him. All in black, soft, noiseless black, a face devoid of all color; large, sad, soft eyes, and hair white as winter snow—that was the woman Sir Victor Catheron saw as he turned round. The face, with all its settled sadness and pallor, was still the face of a beautiful woman, and in weird contradiction to its youth and beauty, were the smooth bands of abundant hair—white as the hair of eighty. The deep, dusk eyes, once so full of pride and fire, looked at him with the tender, saddened light, long, patient suffering had wrought; the lips, once curved in haughtiest disdain, had taken the sweetness of years of hopeless pain. And so, after three-and-twenty years, Victor Catheron saw the woman, whose life his father's falsity and fickleness had wrecked.
"Victor!"
She held out her hand to him shyly, wistfully. The ban of murder had been upon her all these years. Who was to tell that in his inmost heart he too might not brand her as a murderess? But she need not have doubted. If any suspicion yet lingered in his mind, it vanished as he looked at her.
"Miss Catheron!" He grasped her hand, and held it between both his own. "I have but just heard all, for the first time, as you know. That my father lives—that to him you have nobly consecrated your life. He has not deserved it at your hands; let my father's son thank you with all his soul!"
"Ah, hush," she said softly. "I want no thanks. Your poor father! Aunt Helena has told you how miserably all his life has been wrecked—a life once so full of promise."
"She has told me all, Miss Catheron."
"Not Miss Catheron," she interposed, with a smile that lit her worn face into youth and beauty; "not Miss Catheron, surely—Inez, Cousin Inez, if you will. It is twenty-three years—do you know it?—since any one has called me Miss Catheron before. You can't fancy how oddly it sounds."
He looked at her in surprise.