Under any other circumstances Hilary might have smiled; maybe she did smile, and tease him many a time afterward, because the first thing he could find to talk about, after seven years’ absence, was “defalcations in our firm.  But now she listened gravely, and by-and-by took her part in the unimportant conversation which always occurs after such a meeting as this.

“Were you going home, Miss Leaf?  They told me at your house you were expected to dinner.  May I come with you? for I have only a few hours to stay.  To-night I must go on to Liverpool.”

“But we shall hope soon to see you again?”

“I hope so.  And I trust, Miss Leaf, that I do not intrude to-day.”

He said this with his Scotch shyness, or pride, or whatever it was; so like his old self, that it made somebody smile!  But somebody loved it.  Somebody lifted up to his face eyes of silent welcome; sweet, soft, brown eyes, where never, since he knew them, had he seen one cloud of anger darken, one shadow of unkindness rise.

“This is something worth coming home to,” he said in a low voice, and not over lucidly.  Ay, it was.

“I am by no means disinterested in the matter of dinner, Miss Leaf; for I have no doubt of finding good English roast beef and plum pudding on your sister’s birth day.—­Happy returns of the day, Miss Hilary.”

She was so touched by his remembering this, that, to hide it, she put on a spice of her old mischievousness, and asked him if he was aware how old she was?

“Yes; you are thirty; I have known you for fifteen years.”

“It is a long time,” said Johanna, thoughtfully.

Johanna would not have been human had she not been a little thoughtful and silent on the way home, and had she not many times, out of the corners of her eyes, sharply investigated Mr. Robert Lyon.

He was much altered; there was no doubt of that.  Seven years of Indian life would change any body; take the youthfulness out of any body.  It was so with Robert Lyon.  When coming into the parlor he removed his hat, many a white thread was visible in his hair, and besides the spare, dried-up look which is always noticeable in people who have lived long in hot climates, there was an “old” expression in his face, indicating many a worldly battle fought and won, but not without leaving scars behind.  Even Hilary, as she sat opposite to him, at table, could not but feel that he was no longer a young man either in appearance or reality.  We ourselves grow old, or older, without knowing it, but when we suddenly come upon the same fact in another it startles us.  Hilary had scarcely recognized how far she herself had left her girlish days behind till she saw Robert Lyon.

“You think me very much changed?” said he, guessing by his curiously swift intuition of old what she was thinking of.

“Yes, a good deal changed,” she answered truthfully; at which he was silent.