the wooden landing-stage below in the sunshine, "I—I don't want to lose you, Margaret!"
Mrs. Vandeleur met this declaration with a smile, which was courteous rather than cordial, merely acknowledging, as of right, the propriety of the aspiration, treating it as quite conventional. The simplicity of the gesture testified eloquently of the discipline of twenty years; only a woman would have detected the shadow of apprehension in her eyes, the trembling of the hands which seemed so placidly occupied. Her mind was already anxiously on the alert, racing rapidly over the now familiar ground which she had quartered of late so heedfully. For her, his words were ominous; it was of Dorothy surely that he wished to speak, and yet———! In the stress of expectation her thoughts took strange flights, following vague clues fantastically. The inveterate habit of retrospection carried her back, in spite of her scruples; her honest desire to think singly of Dorothy, regarding the fortune of her own life as irrevocably settled, impelled her irresistibly to call to the stage of her imagination a scene which she had often set upon it, a duologue, entirely fictive, which might, but for her perversity, have been enacted—twenty years ago.
Sir Geoffrey rose, and stood leaning with one hand on the back of his chair. This interruption—or perhaps it was the sound of oars and voices which floated in growing volume from the river— served to recall his companion to the present. The silence, of brief duration actually, seemed intolerable. She must break it, and when she spoke it was to name her daughter, aimlessly.
"Dorothy?" repeated Sir Geoffrey, as she paused. "She is extraordinarily like you were before I went away. Not that you are changed—it is delightful to come back and find you the same. It's only when she is with you that I can realise that there is a difference, a———"
"I was