But to all my persuasions, my pleadings, and my utterances she was still the same woman of honour, fearful lest I should come to harm through association with her, fearful lest the unknown fate she dreaded should fall upon us both at the hour of our supreme happiness.
At one moment I felt that I was acting foolishly in thus trying to persuade her into accepting me as her friend, and at others the fact that in social standing I was far beneath her, the daughter of a noble house and well-known in London, impressed itself upon me.
For half an hour we walked onward, heedless of where our footsteps led us. She told me of her recent travels in the East with her father, of their delightful time in the cold weather in India, and afterwards in Sydney and Melbourne.
“My father has been a wanderer ever since my poor mother’s death,” she exclaimed, with a touch of sadness. “He will never remain in England long, because life here always brings back recollections of her. They were a very devoted pair,” she added.
“And so you have accompanied him?”
“Yes, ever since I left the convent school in France. My journeys already have included two trips round the world and a yachting voyage to Spitzbergen.”
“Well,” I laughed, “I thought I had some claim to be a traveller; but you entirely eclipse me.”
“Ah, but I am tired of it—terribly tired, I can assure you.”
I told her how I, too, had suffered from that nostalgia that comes sooner or later to most persons who live abroad, that curious indefinite malady of the heart which causes one to long for home and friends, and to waste in the flesh if the desire is ungratified. You who have lived abroad have experienced it.
I told her how I had lived for years beside that brilliant tideless sea until I had become sun-sick and tired of blue skies, whereupon she sighed and said: