"The thing came to me just now
as a revelation. Poor, dear man, how you must have suffered. This puts
us on a different footing altogether, doesn't it?" "Altogether," he
admitted.
"And," she continued, eyeing him now with a sudden nervousness,
"emboldens me to ask you a question which I have been dying to ask you
for the last few years. I wonder whether you will answer it."
"I wonder!" he repeated.
A change in him, too, was noticeable. That wonderful impassivity of
feature which never even in his lighter moments passed altogether away,
seemed to deepen every line in his hard, clear-cut face. His mouth was
close drawn, his eyes were suddenly colder and expressionless. There
was about him at such times as--these an almost repellent hardness. His
emotions, and the man himself, seemed frozen. Lady Caroom had seen him
look like it once before, and she sighed. Nevertheless, she persevered.
"For nearly twenty years," she said, "you disappeared. You were
reported at different times to be in every quarter of the earth, from
Zambesia to Pekin. But no one knew, and, of course, in a season or two
you were forgotten.
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