She gave him her true, pure hand, and he stooped and left a reverent kiss upon it, and said, as he lifted a brighter face:
“Do you remember three years ago, before you went to Kaiserswerke—when you sent me away, and forbade me to come back until I had sought and found my Fate in Mary?”
“A beautiful and loving Fate, dear Robert.”
“She is, God bless her!” he answered, with a warm flush upon his face and a thrill of tenderness in the charming voice that so many men and women loved him for.
She went with him into the hall then, and said as he threw on his long dark cloak lined with Russian sables:
“Those Berlin and Paris papers of Wednesday last.... It would interest me to glance through them in a spare moment, if you did not object to lend?”
“One of my ‘liveried menials with buttons on his crests,’ as a denunciatory Chartist orator put it the other day—shall bring them to you within half an hour. I wish you had asked me for something less easy to give you, Ada!”
She answered with her gentle eyes on his, as her hand drew back the latch of the hall door:
“Give me assurance you will never help to forge the link that shall unite Great Britain’s interests with her enemy’s.”
“Why, that of course!” He answered without heartiness, and his eyes did not meet hers. “I am not the master blacksmith, dear Ada. There are other hands more cunning in the welding-craft than mine!”