“Never mind, you will just have time for your own salutations, and I will follow directly,” some one said.
Helen’s feet, in spite of her, swerved, stumbled, took her half-way across the road, like feet that were drunken and beyond guidance. She had not been mistaken after all. Whatever was to come of it, had she not known it all from the very first? She was not surprised now, though the discovery set her heart beating once more as if it would break out of her breast. Of course it was he. Could anything be more precise than the description, M. Charles who had been in India? She had been quite sure of it all along.
“Once more I have to ask, is it you, Miss Goulburn? I am sure it can be no one but you.”
“Yes, it is me,” said Helen, simply (but nobody pretends that grammar and nature are the same in respect to this pronoun. She was much disturbed, and she could no more have said I than she could have flown); “and I thought it must be you they meant,” she added, with more simplicity still, “though I heard nothing but your Christian name.”
“Who was it that spoke of me? It is only by accident I have come here. I was going to Sainte-Barbe to find out if anything had been heard of you—if I could find any trace of you.”
“Sainte-Barbe! we left that, Mr Ashton, immediately——”
“I know: after you had seen me.”
Helen sighed. It seemed impossible to her to lie as her father had told her—to say anything to him that was not true. It was very hard even to say what she did falteringly, “We did not mean to stay there, anyhow.”
“Miss Goulburn,” he said, “I have heard a great deal since I have been home. When I saw you last I knew nothing. Miss Temple—I mean my stepmother—is very, very anxious about you. She wants you to go and live with her, and my father wishes it too.”
“Mr Charles, that is very, very kind,” said Helen, shaking her head.