spoken before he had a chance to do so. Instead, she wished to see how
he would greet her, to hear what he would say. She was afraid of him
now. It was not her gift to do the right thing by perfect instinct;
she had to think things out; and so she did now. Still it has to be said
for her that she also had a strange, deep sense of apprehension in the
presence of the man whose arms had held her fast, and then let her go
for so bitter a length of time, in which her pride was lacerated and her
heart brought low. She did not know how she was going to be met now, and
a womanly shyness held her back. If she had said one word--his name
only--it might have made a world of difference to them both at that
moment; for he was tortured by failure, and now when hope was gone, here
was the woman whom he had left in order to force gifts from fate to bring
himself back to her.

"You--you here!" he exclaimed hoarsely. He did not open his arms to her
or go a step nearer to her. His look was that of blank amazement, of
mingled remembrance and stark realisation. This was a turn of affairs
for which he had made no calculation. There had ever been the question
of his return to her, but never of her coming to him. Yet here she was,
debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat
and spectacularly finessed! Here she was with all that expert formality
which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life and
person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly, and
polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out of a
mould and set up to dry. He was not tailor-made, and she had ever been
so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes and
all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal. It was this very perfection, so
charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed him.
"What should I be doing in the home of an angel!" he had exclaimed to
himself in the old home at Lammis.