"You do not owe me any thanks," returned Althea, her lips paling with evident emotion, "for we love her for her own sake, and she is a great comfort to me. Ah, I see my cousin is beckoning to you, so I will wish you good-night."
Everard shook hands with her rather absently; but a moment later he came back to her side.
"Miss Harford, pardon me, but did you say, just now, that Ingram was your cousin."
Then Althea looked a trifle confused. How incautious she had been!
"Yes," she returned, guardedly, "Moritz is certainly our cousin—once removed. When we were at Kitlands, his father, Colonel Ingram, lived abroad, so that is why you never met him. Did you not ever hear us speak of Moritz and Gwendoline."
"I think not—I am sure not." But Everard's eyes were downcast as he spoke. Then, without another word, he lifted his hat and turned away; the mention of Kitlands had been like a stab. Even Althea hardly guessed how this meeting had tried him, and how cruelly his pride had suffered.
Althea was very silent all the way home. She was tired, she said, and Doreen and Waveney must discuss the play without her; but as she leant back in her corner of the carriage, very little of the conversation reached her ears. Ah, she had noted all the changes now. The shiny dress-coat, the lines, the slight baldness, had all been apparent under the flaring gaslights in the lobby. She could see now that Everard was aged and altered.
The spring and brightness of youth had gone, and care and disappointment and ceaseless drudgery had given him the stoop of age. Already his shoulders seemed bowed, as though some heavy load lay on them; but the face, grave and careworn as it was, was the face of her old lover. The features were as finely chiselled as ever. No sorrow, no failure, no wearing sense of humiliation, would ever rob Everard Ward of his man's beauty, though perhaps an artist would no longer desire to paint him as Ithuriel.
"I am glad to have seen him again," thought Althea; but a dry sob rose in her throat as she said it. How coldly, how gravely he had accosted her! He had expressed no pleasure in meeting his old friends, had asked no single question about their welfare. A few stiff words of thanks for her kindness to Waveney, but nothing more, nothing more; and Althea's eyes grew misty with unshed tears in the darkness.
There were some lines by Miss Murdoch that Everard had once written in her album. She had read them so often that she knew them by heart; they were haunting her now.