With an impulse she hardly understood, she raised the light and turned it until her face and her bare throat were brilliantly illuminated. The dark cloak fell away a little. The dark eyes looked at him with defiance and appeal. Her beauty, seen like that, had something that startled; it was so devoid of life and colour, and yet so great! After a long, breathless minute Anthony said in his slow voice:
“You have changed more than I have, Lady Heritage, for you have changed your name.”
He saw the last vestige of colour leave her face. She put the lamp down, and her silence startled him.
“No one would have known me,” he said after a pause that was all strain.
“I knew you,” said Raymond very low.
“Only because the lower part of my face was hidden. You’d have passed me in daylight. You have passed me.”
She winced at that, turned the light full on to him again, and said:
“You are working in the laboratory—that’s—that’s why....” She broke off for a minute and went on with a sort of violence, “You say that I didn’t know you, but I did—I did. All this week I’ve been tormented with your presence. All this week I’ve felt you just at hand, just out of reach. I kept saying to myself, ‘Tony’s dead,’ and expecting to meet you round every corner. It was driving me mad.”
“It sounds most uncomfortable,” said Anthony dryly.
Raymond saw a mocking look pass over his face. She turned the light away and set it down. If she had not felt physically incapable of rising to her feet, she would have left him then. This was not Anthony at all, only the anger, the bitterness, the cold resentment which she had hated in him. These, not Anthony, had come back from the grave.