She nodded her great bonnet at him with gentle amusement. 'You
are insistent in your fancy. Well, let me think again. The last
to leave me was Fanny Urquhart, that was--let me see--last
October. Now you are certainly not Fanny Urquhart's son,' she
stooped austerely, 'for she never had one. Last year, too, I
heard that my dear, dear Mrs Jameson was dead. HER I hadn't met
for many, many years. But, if I may venture to say so, yours is
not a Scottish face; and she not only married a Scottish husband,
but was herself a Dunbar. No, I am still at a loss.'

A miserable strife was in her chance companion's mind, a strife
of anger and recrimination. He turned his eyes wearily to the
fast declining sun. 'You will forgive my persistency, but I
assure you it is a matter of life or death to me. Is there no one
my face recalls? My voice?'

Miss Sinnet drew her long lips together, her eyebrows lifted with
the faintest perturbation. 'But he certainly knows my name,' she
said to herself. She turned once more, and in the still autumnal
beauty, beneath that pale blue arch of evening, these two human
beings confronted one another again. She eyed him blandly, yet
with a certain grave directness.

'I don't really think,' she said, 'you can be Mary Lawford's son.
I could scarcely have mistaken HIM.'

Lawford gulped and turned away. He hardly knew what this surge of
feeling meant. Was it hope, despair, resentment; had he caught
even the echo of an unholy joy? His mind for a moment became