He fixed his eyes upon the leather cases, as if they had been so many coffins. For the moment he gave up the attempt to consider his expedition. It seemed so important that he should realise just how futile his attempts to undo the past must inevitably prove.

A light step came along the pa.s.sage. He almost groaned, for it might have been hers; and he dreaded lest all his life he should be pursued by those haunting footfalls. Then a touch upon the handle of the door startled him in a second from apathy. The handle was turning, the door was about to open. What should he see? In his present exalted abnormal frame of mind, he might see anything, might even cause his thought of her to take shape, so that she stood in bodily presence before him.

It seemed to him only what he had foreseen when the slowly opening oak revealed her standing there.

He knew that it was her wraith, because she was so white--so unnaturally white. She wore white, too. Her eyes were dilated, with a dread which she could not conceal. It is possible that he might have heard the beating of her heart, had his own not pulsed so loudly.

He rose slowly to his feet--slowly, to match her entrance. He neither moved nor spoke, as she shut the door carefully behind her. As she did so the thought stirred in his mind that he had never heard of a ghost who closed a door. But his mind was a long way off. The part of him now active was something utterly different.

Then she moved forward towards him as he stood in the circle of light.

She came on bravely until she was within a few paces of him, and then paused, and gave a little sound between a laugh and a gasp.

"Well," said she, and valiantly held out her hand, "I have come back, you see!"

He was so startled at her voice that he gave a low cry. Moving suddenly--always with him a mark of strong agitation--he first grasped her hand in both his own, then retaining it with one, pa.s.sed the other hesitatingly up her arm, till it rested upon her warm shoulder. "My G.o.d," he said, "you are real! Speak, Virginia--are you real?"

She set her teeth in the effort not to flinch, but she shook so that her trembling was perceptible to him.

"Real? Yes, of course. Did you think I was a ghost?" she asked, shrinking a little backward, so that his hand fell from her shoulder.

"I did! How could you come here? You were ill! Ferris said----"

"But I am better, and I told you in my letter that I should come the first minute that I was able."

"What letter?"

She shuddered a little. Then it was true! Her letter had been kept back! "I telegraphed to-day," she stammered, more and more nervous.

"You were out, but the motor met me at the station. When I arrived I told them not to tell you I was here. I--I thought I would tell you myself. Oh, are you angry with me?"

"Angry?" he said with breaking voice. He turned his head aside, for he could not control the working of his face.

"Why are you so surprised to see me?" she ventured, after a pause. "You knew I should come back."

"How could I know it?" he asked, almost inaudibly.

"I was on my honour," she answered, equally low. Then, gathering force as he still stood with averted face, "I gave you my word to submit to anything, if you let me go to Pansy. She doesn't need me any more, so I am here." She waited a moment, but still he did not speak. "I am well and strong now," she persisted bravely. "I can do anything that you wish. What are you going to do with me?"

"There's only one thing I can do with you," came the answer. "I can't let you go."

She stood immovably, her eyes fixed upon him. The dread lest he was not perfectly sane once more a.s.sailed her. Her mother had spoken of him as a monomaniac. Perhaps she feared him more at that moment than ever previously.

When he turned abruptly, with his characteristic jerk, she started and shrank only too visibly.

"Explain," he said. "Sit down in this chair--you look as white as a sheet--and explain. You tell me you are well and strong. Your mother in a letter which I got last Sat.u.r.day morning told me you were seriously ill. Ferris, whom I met to-day in town, said that the doctor would not let you get up. There is some discrepancy here."

Her eyes filled with tears. "I know," she said. "May I tell you about it?"

"Certainly."

He had seated her in the old wooden writing-chair from which he had risen. He fetched another for himself, and placed it near. The lamp fell upon her burnished hair and upon his strained face as he raised it to her. It struck her that he was very different from her memory of him. His eyes had surely grown larger, his face thinner. His close-cut hair changed his appearance. He wore other, nicer clothes than those in which she was accustomed to see him; but chiefly he looked younger, less a.s.sured. There was something almost wistful in his expression.

She gave a swift, appraising glance, and lowered her eyes to the table.

In her nervousness she would have liked to take up a paper knife and play with it. Some deep instinct told her to be simple and perfectly straightforward. She let her hands lie in her lap.

"Mamma," she began, "did not want me to come back. I--I suppose she told you of the vexatious motor accident, which obliged Mr. Rosenberg and me to stop the night in a horrid little wayside inn?"

"She said something of it--yes."

"Of course I was most anxious not to have to be away all night, because I was to leave Worthing next day to come back here, and so, when the car did not return, I was urgent in begging that we might try to reach home some other way. So we drove in a little open cart, through pouring rain, to try and catch a train--the last train--and just missed it. I got very wet, and I could not dry my things properly, the place was so dirty and comfortless; and I got a little feverish chill. It was not much, but it made me delirious for some hours. I think the fever was partly because I was vexed and anxious. You see, I had written to you to say I was coming, and it was annoying to be stopped like that.

Anyway, when I was sensible again mamma said I--I had been saying things ... you understand ... things about you ... when I didn't know what I was talking about."

"I see." His tone was dry.

"I had been very careful," she urged humbly, "not to say anything about what had pa.s.sed between us. I hope you will forgive me for letting things out, unintentionally?"

"Let me hear all that happened before we talk about that."

She looked frightened, but after a short pause continued indomitably.

"Mamma seemed horrified. She begged me not to come back to you. In order to delay my coming, she told the doctor to keep me in bed, though I was practically well. I did not know what to do. I pretended to give in. Then she went to town--this morning--for a day's shopping or something, and Grover and I ran away without telling anybody. I hope you think I did right. You see, I knew I ought to come; I would not have deceived mamma, but my first duty is to you, and Grover told me that she had done something she really had no right to do. She had intercepted a letter from me to you. Ah, I know, it was partly my fault. I don't know what I may have said when I was wandering. She thought she was acting for the best, no doubt. But I felt unsafe somehow."

"I suppose you mean," said Gaunt slowly, "that your mother thought you had better not come back to me at all?"

"I think so--yes. She said the law would give me relief----"

"She was very probably right. And yet--you came? ... It did not strike you that that was a foolish thing to do? You did not reflect that possession is nine points of the law?"

He was looking fully at her, voice and eyes alike charged with meaning which could not be mistaken. She did not flinch. Her brown eyes told him that she had reflected, that in returning she was fully conscious of the finality of her action.

"I had not to consider that," was her instant reply. "I had to do what I knew to be right. I had to keep my word."

She spoke most evidently without any desire to create an effect. The listening man restrained himself with difficulty, but held on for a moment, to elucidate one more point.

"You came back, perhaps, in order to lay the case before me? To see if I would set you free?"

"Certainly not," was the steady answer. "You and I made an agreement.

You have kept your half--you have done all you promised; but I"--the colour rushed over her face--"I have not done any of my share."

Not at all theatrically, but as naturally as an old Italian peasant will kiss the Madonna's feet, he slipped from his chair to his knees.

So quietly that it did not startle Virginia at all, he took up one of the hands that lay in her lap and raised it to his lips. The action, so unlike him, the silence in which he performed it, amazed her so that she neither moved nor spoke. He replaced her hand, laying it tenderly down, and seemed as though he would speak, from his lowly position at her feet. Then, with his own brusque suddenness, he rose, and stood beside her, almost over her.

"G.o.d has used me better than I deserved," he muttered gruffly. "He has let me prove--prove to the hilt--that there is such a thing as a perfectly n.o.ble woman. Virginia, there shall be a way out for you. If you think my word of any value, I give it solemnly. I will make things right somehow. I may not be able to do it at once; I must think the matter over carefully. In the meantime, I want you to understand my position." He paused a moment, and then spoke more fluently, as if the thing he expressed had long been in his mind and so came easily from his lips. "When I first met you I had been, to all intents and purposes, a madman for twenty years. I had not been twenty-four hours your husband before I came to myself. It was as though--only I can't express it--as though your innocence were a looking-gla.s.s, in which I saw the kind of thing I am. Ever since, I have been your humble servant. I--I tried to let you see this, but of course it was hopeless.

You were ill, and they told me to keep out of your way. Then, when you left me ... your heart was full of your little sister, occupied with your own grief. I couldn't force on you the consideration of mine."

He paused, and she knew it was to summon command of his voice.

"And the idea came to me that I would wait--that I would find out, for a certainty, that you really were as fine as I had grown to think you.

I wanted to prove that you were heroic enough to come back to--to the sort of thing which, as you believed, awaited you here. So I wouldn't write to you as I longed to ... I just kept silence ... and you came.

You are here ... I am such a fool at saying what I mean, but I must make you understand that, for so long as it may be necessary for you to remain, you are sacred. I--I will ask you to let me eat with you, and be with you sometimes, because of--er--the household. But once for all, I want you to feel quite sure that you have nothing to fear from me."