Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She threw herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a tremor almost equal to her own.
"Oh! do come with me—come away!—I want to talk to you!" she said incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winterbourne with a strong hand.
Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the terrace.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elder lady—"to think of finding you here! How astonishing—how—how dreadful! No!—I don't mean that. Of course you and he must meet—but it was only yesterday he told me he had never seen you again—since—and it gave me a turn. I was very foolish just now. There now—stay here a moment—and tell me about yourself."
And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling. She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed it in the dark so that no one saw.
"I am glad to see you again," she said passionately, "so glad!"
Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.
"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child! And I have heard so little of you—your mother never seemed to know. When will you come and see me—or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to a ball. How strange"—she broke off—"how very strange that you and he should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with Lord Maxwell."
"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily. "Will you come to tea with me next week?—Oh, I will write.—And we must go too—where can my friend be?"
She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.