silent, with unlifted hand, staring at him! I am dumb with pain—not love; I am looking at him in sorrow—not love. Oh! what have these past years held for him that they have altered face, look, and figure so fearfully? You may be loved for your own sake, Paul Vasher, but never more will a woman love you for your beauty. Grey, haggard, worn—who could believe that you had ever been proud, imperious, passionate? A bitter pain shoots through my heart as I recall the face that I saw in my looking-glass three hours ago-pale as it was, and a little fallen; but with such suffering writ on it as on this? No! After all it is he who speaks first, and my words used to be so much more frequent and ready than his.
"I was going to the Manor House," he says.
He is standing beside me now. We make each other no greeting.
"Let me look at you," he says, coming a step nearer; "I have not seen you for three years, remember."
He stands looking into my face, line by line, feature by feature, for a full minute, then he turns away.
"You can never have cared as I did," he says—"never—to look as you look to-day."
"Hush!" I cry, starting aside; "we made our last farewells, spoke our last words on that Christmas morning: in this present we are nothing to each other—nothing."
"And may we not remember?"
"Remember!" I repeat, turning pale. "Do you not see that there is the sin, there the wickedness? We must not remember—we will not!"
"Speak for yourself, child," he says bitterly. "I am too old now to learn the meaning of the word forget. Have you learnt it?" he cries, with the old jealous ring in his voice that I know so well—and it turns me giddy and sick with the memories it brings.
