His words, accompanied by that painful smile, went straight to her heart.  “Ah, don’t—­don’t!” she said.  “Did you think I could forget you so easily, or be any thing but wretched while you were there?”

He looked at her again, this time intently, “What can you be made of, Sylvia?” he said.  “Do you mean to say you found it easy to forgive me?”

She dashed the tears from her eyes.  “I don’t remember that I was ever—­angry with you,” she said.  “Somehow I realized—­from the very first—­that—­that—­it was just—­bad luck.”

“You amaze me!” he said.

She smiled at him.  “Do I?  I don’t quite see why.  Is it so amazing that one should want to pass on and make the best of things?  That is how I feel now.  It seems so long ago, Guy,—­like another existence almost.  It is too far away to count.”

“Are you talking of the old days?” he broke in, in a voice that grated.  “Or of the time a few weeks ago when you got here to find yourself stranded?”

She made a little gesture of protest.  “It wasn’t for long.  I don’t want to think of it.  But it might have been much worse.  Burke was—­is still—­so good to me.”

“Is he?” said Guy.  He was looking at her curiously, and instinctively she turned away, avoiding his eyes.

“Come and have some lunch!” she said.  “He ought to be in directly.”

“He is in,” said Guy.  “He went round to the stable.”

It was another instance of Burke’s goodness that he had not been present at their meeting.  She turned to lead the way within with a warm feeling at her heart.  It was solely due to this consideration of his that she had not suffered the most miserable embarrassment.  Somehow she felt that she could not possibly have endured that first encounter in his presence.  But now that it was over, now that she had made acquaintance with this new Guy—­this stranger with Guy’s face, Guy’s voice, but not Guy’s laugh or any of the sparkling vitality that had been his—­she felt she wanted him.  She needed his help.  For surely now he knew Guy better than she did!

It was with relief that she heard his step, entering from the back of the house.  He came in, whistling carelessly, and she glanced instinctively at Guy.  That sound had always made her think of him.  Had he forgotten how to whistle also, she wondered?

She expected awkwardness, constraint; but Burke surprised her by his ease of manner.  Above all, she noticed that he was by no means kind to Guy.  He treated him with a curt friendliness from which all trace of patronage was wholly absent.  His attitude was rather that of brother than host, she reflected.  And its effect upon Guy was of an oddly bracing nature.  The semi-defiant air dropped from him.  Though still subdued, his manner showed no embarrassment.  He even, as time passed, became in a sardonic fashion almost jocose.

In company with Burke, he drank lager-beer, and he betrayed not the smallest desire to drink too much.  Furtively she watched him throughout the meal, trying to adjust her impressions, trying to realize him as the lover to whom she had been faithful for so long, the lover who had written those always tender, though quite uncommunicative letters, the lover, who had cabled her his welcome, and then had so completely and so cruelly failed her.