It was certainly her voice; but in all his recollection he had never heard this tone in it. He waited listening, half amused, half sad, beginning to wonder more and more. At last he yielded to a sudden impulse, and went straight forward to the half-opened door.
There he stood for a moment arrested, struck dumb. And they, too, struck by the sound of the man’s foot, so different from their own velvet steps, turned round and looked at him. Was that Anna? His heart, which had been beating so high, stopped short, and seemed to drop, drop into some unknown depths. “Oh yes, I see,” he said to himself. “I see, I see. She is as handsome as ever——” But was that Anna? He stood on the threshold of this room, which was sacred to her, holding his breath.
Then the strange old woman, who was Anna, beckoned to him imperiously with her hand.
“Come in, come in,” she said, “whoever you are, who are using a name—— Come in. I do not know if you are aware that Mr Leonard Crosthwaite, whose name you are assuming——” Here she stopped and fixed two great, brilliant, dark eyes upon him, opened to their full width, glowing like angry stars. She made a pause of about a minute long, which seemed to the two others like an hour. Then she dropped her voice with a careless inflection, as if after that gaze she disdained the risk she was running—“died,” she added indifferently, but pausing on the word—“at least twenty years ago.”
“He did not die, Anna, since I am here,” said the stranger.
It was impossible to speak to her, even now, without some tenderness getting into his voice.
“Do not venture to speak to me, sir, by my Christian name. Do you know there is a punishment for impostors? Oh, you think perhaps you know just how far you can go without infringing the law. Perhaps you think, too, that we are alone here, and you can frighten us. But that is a mistake. There is a butler, a strong man, whom I can summon in a moment with this bell, and there is my nephew. Any attempt at bullying or extortion will be useless here.”
“Oh, Anna!” her sister cried; then she clasped her hands, turning to the visitor—“I told you she was changed.”
A series of different emotions passed over the Canadian’s face—he smiled, then laughed angrily, growing red and hot; but over these variations stole such a softening of regret as combined all in one sorrowful sense of change. He nodded his head gently in reply to what the other sister said.
“You are right,” he said in a low tone; “as handsome as ever, but how different! Anna, Anna, though we have been separated so long—though you cast me off, and I thought had forgotten me—though I am married and a happy man—yet you have never been put out of your place in my heart all these years.”