Elizabeth told briefly, though not without emotion, all that had happened between herself and Tom, and how he was married to Esther Martin.  And then both women went back, in a moralizing way, to the days when they had both been “young” at Stowbury, and how different life was from what they then thought and looked forward to—­Miss Hilary and her “bower maiden.”

“Yes,” answered the former with a sigh, “things are indeed not as people fancy when they are girls.  We dream, and dream, and think we see very far into the future, which nobody sees but God.  I often wonder how my life will end.”

Elizabeth said, after a pause, “I always felt sure you would be married, Miss Hilary.  There was one person—­Is he alive still?  Is he ever coming home?”

“I don’t know.”

“I am sure he was very fond of you.  And he looked like a good man.”

“He was the best man I ever knew.”

This was all Miss Hilary said, and she said it softly and mournfully.  She might never have said it at all; but it dropped from her unawares in the deep feeling of the moment, when her heart was tender over Elizabeth’s own sad, simply told story.  Also because of a sudden and great darkness which had come over her own.

Literally, she did not now know whether Robert Lyon were alive or dead.  Two months ago his letters had suddenly ceased, without any explanation, his last being exactly the same as the others—­as frank, as warmly affectionate, as cheerful and brave.

One solution to this was his possible coming home.  But she did not, after careful reasoning on the subject, believe that likely.  She knew exactly his business relations with his employers; that there was a fixed time for his return to England, which nothing except the very strongest necessity could alter.  Even in the chance of his health breaking, so as to incapacitate him for work, he should, he always said, have to go to the hills, rather than take the voyage home prematurely.  And in that case he certainly would have informed his friends of his movements.  There was nothing erratic, or careless, or eccentric about Robert Lyon; he was a practical, business-like Scotchman—­far too cautious and too regular in all his habits to be guilty of those accidental negligences by which wanderers abroad sometimes cause such cruel anxieties to friends at home.

For the same reason, the other terrible possibility—­his death—­was not likely to have happened without their hearing of it.  Hilary felt sure, with the strong confidence of love, that he would have taken every means to leave her some last word—­some farewell token—­which would reach hereafter he was gone, and comfort her with the assurance of what, living, he had never plainly told.  Sometimes, when a wild terror of his death seized her, this settled conviction drove it back again.  He must be living, or she would have heard.