She moved across and took it, as he placed it by the angle of the wide hearth; and lifted her skirts aside with a movement that came back to him from a long way off, like her tone in speaking—and, shading her deep gray eyes from the dull red heat with her white left hand, looked at him intently. He, having pushed his own seat back into the borders of the shadowland beyond the taper’s gleam and the hearth glow, looked back at her. That hand of hers bore no ring. When he had broken the plain gold link that had fettered it in time past, he had set in its place a ruby that had belonged to his mother. The ruby was on his finger now. He hid it out of sight in the pocket of his velvet painting coat, not knowing why he did so. And at that moment she broke the silence with:
“You see I have come to you at last!�
He replied, with conscious heaviness:
“Yes—I see!�
“Has the time seemed long?... We have no time, you know, where.... Is it many days since?...�
“Many days!�
“My poor Robert!... Weeks?... Months?... Not years?...�
“Fifteen years....�
“Fifteen years! And you have suffered all that time. Oh, cruel! cruel! If there was more light here, I might see your face more plainly. Dear face! I shall not love it less if there are lines and marks of grief upon it—it will not seem less handsome to me at forty than it did at twenty-five! Ah, I wish there was more light!� The old pettishly coaxing tones! “But yet I do not wish for it, lest it should show you any change in me!�
“You are not changed in the least.� He drew breath hard. “It might be yesterday——,� he said, and left the sentence unfinished.