She did not rise, and he advanced towards her.

‘Alan!’ The name escaped her, poignant, even piteous in the suddenness and intensity of its utterance. A long succession of days, of weeks—a weight of waiting—seemed to be visibly thrust before him, painted on the wing of that swift cry.

And something more: behind it lurked a note of anguish, faint, but clashing audibly against its joy.

Insensibly he recoiled before the unfamiliar greeting. It was unlike her, unlike anything he had heard before. But in a moment the blue eyes, so strangely lit, resumed their old expression of half-bantering welcome; and she beckoned him forward, with the well-known wave of a small commanding hand.

‘Come here, you wonderful apparition; I want to assure my senses, test my sanity. Is it actually you?’

‘Unmistakably. I have come for my answer’, he began briefly, hurriedly: aware that she had given it, before his question, in that startling and involuntary utterance of his name.

‘You speak as if you were presenting a bill,’ she responded, laughing, ‘and the demand sounds somewhat peremptory, when I have been wondering if I should ever have to meet it. Oh, there are long arrears, I know’, she added, taking his hand as he stood beside her. ‘Sit here.’ She made a place for him, and looked frankly, earnestly, at his slightly matured face.

‘Why,’ she said, drawing back in mock alarm, ‘it is a man I have to deal with!’ And then, with a quick and winning sweetness, ‘shall I tell you a secret, Captain Henley? I am rather disappointed, for—for—as a fact I loved the boy.’

‘Then why did you play with him?’ he broke out, hardly able to control his bitterness, and returning her close gaze intently. ‘Your whim’—he spoke the truth baldly, careless, for the moment, whether or not she caught his meaning—‘your whim has cost me much an honest answer would have saved me.’

‘You have a right, knowing so little, to reproach me. I will tell you’, she returned gently. ‘It was after all, I suppose, mere egotism, because I cared for you more than myself. Your happiness was, is, will always, so I fancy, be more to me than mine.’

An impulse came to him to put the truth before her, to tell his story plainly. For this woman whom he had loved inspired him strongly still with trust. Her mind, he knew, was sounder than the minds of other women he had met, and he could not fail to trust the heart that shone so clearly, straightly, through the blue eyes regarding him. He might have yielded to that momentary impulse, had she not broken in too hastily upon his wavering thought.

‘I chose the most effectual lie that I could frame that day—do you remember?—when I told you that you were not the first, you might not be the last. You are the first’—her glance fell suddenly upon the yellow volume which had slipped, at his entrance, from the sofa to the floor—‘you will be certainly the last. Lying always disgusts me. I pray you forgive my first and only lie.’

He offered no response, but rose and stood silently, awkwardly beside her, loth to return her honesty with artificial protestation, knowing that speech was required of him, painfully seeking words.

She laughed, remembering him sometimes dumb of old, and went on with a trace of hesitation in her tone.

‘My openness surprises you; but look at this’, and she spread out before him a denuded, shrunken hand.

‘How bare it is!’ he said, taking it quietly in his own. ‘Where are the old adornments? Why have you forsaken them?’