It was only four o’clock when she reached the square, and the nurses and children were just beginning to come in. She looked everywhere, but there was no sign of Mrs. Meade and little Pet.
“I am too early. I must sit down in some quiet, secluded spot and wait,” she thought, and sought a shady seat on the slope of the hill back of the Capitol building.
“It was here we sat that day when Norman told me he was going to London,” she murmured sadly, and then she recoiled with a sudden cry:
“Oh!”
The quiet bench she sought was already occupied, and by Norman Wylde himself.
She could scarcely repress a wild and passionate cry of pain and reproach. As it was, she dared not trust herself, and turned to flee.
But Norman Wylde had been aroused from a deep abstraction by her low exclamation of dismay, and, starting up, he confronted her, coming out of such a mood that he for a moment fancied his lost love had come back from the other world to comfort his sad heart. A glad cry came from his lips:
“Pansy!”
That name arrested her footsteps. She paused, frightened, moveless. Had he recognized her? Would he tax her with her identity?
“Pansy!” he repeated tenderly, and, although she trembled and grew faint at the passion in his voice, it came to her suddenly that she must make some defense for herself. She, the honored wife of the proud Colonel Falconer, must never own herself to be that Pansy Laurens whom the man before her had deceived and betrayed. She would be brave and proud for her husband’s sake, as well as for her own.