Hermia began to feel far from comfortable, and she was just considering whether she had not better go back to Mr. Wingate, when the door was suddenly opened from within, and she found herself face to face with Richard Varrel.
She knew him again at a glance, despite the woeful change which a few short years had wrought in him. In days gone by, when he was a clerk, and she a girl of ten or twelve, she used often to meet him on her way to school, when he had always a smiling "Good-morning" for her. In those days he was a dandified, good-looking young man, with a facile smile, and the easy manner of one who was on excellent terms with himself and the world.
Hermia had not seen him after his "misfortune," as he termed it, till the evening of the trial when he spoke to John Brancker through the cab window, and even then she had been shocked to see the change in him; but now, when she beheld him again, the change was still more marked. His hands trembled like aspen leaves, his eyes were bleared and bloodshot, his face sallow and fallen away to little more than skin and bone.
He stood staring at Hermia, holding the open door in his hand, with a sort of half-gleam of recognition in his furtively suspicious eyes.
"Mr. Varrel," she said, "I see that you fail to remember me. My name is Hermia Rivers, and I am the niece of Mr. Brancker, of Ashdown."
The moment she began to speak his face lighted up with what seemed like the ghost of his old pleasant smile.
"What a stupid I must be to have forgotten you even for a moment!" he exclaimed. "Why of course I remember you, Miss Hermia--remember you from the time you were no higher than a table. Do you know what I used to think in those days? But how should you? I used to think that when you grew up I should like to marry you. Ah, I did, and I was in earnest about it, too!"
This was not at all what Hermia wanted, so she made haste to say:
"Are you not curious, Mr. Varrel, to know why I have come all this way to find you? But, first of all, why did you neglect to answer the letter I wrote you to this address more than a week ago?"
"Letter!--what letter?" he queried, with a half-mazed look, and with that he pushed back his hat and pressed his hands to his forehead for a few moments, as if trying to recall something to mind. Then, half-doubtingly, he thrust his hand into an inner pocket of his coat and drew from it a letter--the one Hermia had written him, as she saw at a glance, and still unopened. He stared at it for a space of a dozen seconds, and then he said, confusedly: