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Outside a few people were coming toward the abbey from both parties of excursionists. Hagar and Mrs. Detlor were walking by themselves. Mrs. Detlor was speaking almost breathlessly. “Yes, I recognized the writing. She is nothing, then, to you, nor has ever been?”

“Nothing, on my honor. I did her a service once. She asks me to do another, of which I am as yet ignorant. That is all. Here is her letter.”

CHAPTER III. NO OTHER WAY.

George Hagar was the first to move. He turned and looked at Mrs. Detlor. His mind was full of the strangeness of the situation–this man and woman meeting under such circumstances after twelve years, in which no lines of their lives had ever crossed. But he saw, almost unconsciously, that she had dropped his rose. He stooped, picked it up and gave it to her. With a singular coolness–for, though pale, she showed no excitement–she quietly arranged the flower at her throat, still looking at the figure on the platform. A close observer would occasionally have found something cynical–even sinister–in Mark Telford’s clear cut, smoothly chiseled face, but at the moment when he wheeled slowly and faced these two there was in it nothing but what was strong, refined and even noble. His eyes, dark and full, were set deep under well hung brows, and a duskiness in the flesh round them gave them softness as well as power. Withal there was a melancholy as striking as it was unusual in him.

In spite of herself Mrs. Detlor felt her heart come romping to her throat, for, whatever this man was to her now, he once was her lover. She grew hot to her fingers. As she looked, the air seemed to palpitate round her, and Mark Telford to be standing in its shining hot surf tall and grand. But, on the instant, there came into this lens the picture she had seen in George Hagar’s studio that morning. At that moment Mildred Margrave and Baron were entering at the other end of the long, lonely nave. The girl stopped all at once and pointed toward Telford as he stood motionless, uncovered. “See,” she said, “how fine, how noble he looks!”

Mrs. Detlor turned for an instant and saw her.

Telford had gazed calmly, seriously, at Mrs. Detlor, wondering at nothing, possessed by a strange, quieting feeling. There was, for the moment, no thought of right or wrong, misery or disaster, past or future, only–this is she! In the wild whistle of arctic winds he had sworn that he would cease to remember, but her voice ran laughing through them as it did through the blossoms of the locust trees at Tellavie, and he could not forget. When the mists rose from the blue lake on a summer plain, the rosy breath of the sun bearing them up and scattering them like thistledown, he said that he would think no more of her; but, stooping to drink, he saw her face in the water, as in the hill spring at Tellavie, and he could not forget. When he rode swiftly through the long prairie grass, each pulse afire, a keen, joyful wind playing on him as he tracked the buffalo, he said he had forgotten, but he felt her riding beside him as she had done on the wide savannas of the south, and he knew that he could not forget. When he sat before some lodge in a pleasant village and was waited on by soft voiced Indian maidens and saw around him the solitary content of the north, he believed that he had ceased to think; but, as the maidens danced with slow monotony and grave, unmelodious voices, there came in among them an airy, sprightly figure, singing as the streams do over the pebbles, and he could not forget. When in those places where women are beautiful, gracious and soulless, he saw that life can be made into mere convention and be governed by a code, he said that he had learned how to forget; but a pale young figure rose before him with the simple reproach of falsehood, and he knew that he should always remember.