Where there had been only wild amazement in her eyes, he beheld now a growing horror, until mercifully she covered her face with her hands.
For a moment he copied her action. He, too, acting spasmodically, covered his face. The years rolled back; the room with its table laid for that infamous supper melted away to be replaced in his vision by a cherry orchard in bloom, and in that orchard a girl on a swing, teasing yet adorable, singing a song that brought him, young and clean and honourable, hastening to her side. He saw himself a lad of twenty going out into the world with a lady’s glove in his hat—a glove that to this day he cherished—bent upon knight-errantry for that sweet lady’s sake, to conquer the world, no less, that he might cast it in her lap. And he saw her—this Sylvia Farquharson of the Duke’s Theatre—as she had been in those long-dead days when her name was Nancy Sylvester.
The years had wrought in her appearance a change that utterly disguised her. Where in this resplendently beautiful woman could he discover the little child he had loved so desperately? How could he have dreamt of his little Nancy Sylvester transformed into the magnificent Sylvia Farquharson, whose name he had heard used as a byword for gallantry, lavishness, and prodigality, whose fame was as widespread and questionably lustrous as that of Moll Davies or Eleanor Gwynn?
He reeled back until his shoulders came to rest against the closed door, and stared and stared in dazed amazement, his soul revolted by the horror of the situation in which they found themselves.
“God!” he groaned aloud. “My Nan! My little Nan!”
CHAPTER XVIII THE PARLEY
At any other time and in any other place this meeting must have filled him with horror of a different kind. His soul might have been swept by pain and anger to find Nancy Sylvester, whom his imagination had placed high and inaccessible as the very stars, whose memory had acted as a beacon to him, casting a pure white light to guide him through the quagmire of many a vile temptation, reduced to this state of—as he judged it—evil splendour.