“I didn’t know it was going to be such a swell affair, or I shouldn’t have come,” he said. Her room was always kept ready for her. Often she would lie there, watching the moonlight creep across the floor; and a curious feeling would come to her of being something wandering, incomplete. She would see as through a mist the passionate, restless child with the rebellious eyes to whom the room had once belonged; and later the strangely self-possessed girl with that impalpable veil of mystery around her who would stand with folded hands, there by the window, seeming always to be listening. And she, too, had passed away. The tears would come into her eyes, and she would stretch out yearning arms towards their shadowy forms. But they would only turn upon her eyes that saw not, and would fade away.!

They both laughed. “He’s a good lad,” said her father. “Did you have a good house?” the girl asked him. “Saw you from the distance, waving your arms about. Hadn’t time to stop.”

“You told me my coming would take you back thirty-three years,” Joan reminded him. “It makes us about the same age. I shall treat you as just a young man.” “It only came an hour or two ago,” her father explained. “If he wrote to you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived.” She reached home in the evening. She thought to find her father in his study. But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great drawing-room. She opened the door softly. The room was dark save for a flicker of firelight; she could see nothing. Nor was there any sound.