But that moment never came.  The very anticipation of it was lost in the thrill of the visitor’s belated entrance.  Yet nothing could have been quieter than the manner of it.  She (for it was a lady) came into the room as if she had lived at Mrs. Downey’s all her life, and knew her way already from the doorway to her chair.  When she said, “I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I’m rather late,” she seemed to be taking for granted their recognition of a familiar personal characteristic.  Perhaps it was because she was so tall that her voice sounded like music dropped downward from a height.

There was a stir, a movement down each side of the table; it was subtle, like the flutter of light and wind, and sympathetic, answering to her footfall and the flowing rhythm of her gown.  As it passed, Mrs. Downey’s face became if possible more luminous, Miss Bramble’s figure if possible more erect.  A feeble flame flickered in Mr. Partridge’s cheeks; Mr. Soper began feeling nervously in his pocket for the box of bon-bons, his talisman of success; while Mr. Spinks appeared as if endeavouring to assume a mental attitude not properly his own.  Miss Bishop searched, double-chinned, for any crumbs that might have lodged in the bosom of her blouse; and Flossie, oh, Flossie became more demure, more correct, more absolutely the model of all propriety.  Each was so occupied with his or herself that no one noticed the very remarkable behaviour of Mr. Rickman.  He rose to his feet.  He turned his back on Flossie.  There was a look on his face as of a man seized with sudden terror, and about to fly.

In turning he found himself face to face with Lucia Harden.

He had the presence of mind to stand back and draw her chair from the table for her; so that his action appeared the natural movement of politeness.

Though she held out her hand by an instinct of recognition, there was a perceptible pause before she spoke.  He had known that it was she before he saw her.  She had to look at him twice to make quite sure.

And then, being sure, she smiled; not the slow, cold smile of politeness that dies downwards on the lips, but the swift smile of pleasure that leaps to the eyes and forehead.

“Mr. Rickman—?  I think I should have known you anywhere else; but I didn’t expect to meet you here.”

He looked at her courageously.

And as he looked there fell from him the past five years, the long estranging years of bitterness and misery and vain desire, and the years, still more estranging, of his madness and his folly; and not the thinnest phantom shadow of time divided him from the days of Harmouth, That moment of recognition annihilated all between; a lustre of his life swept away in one sweep of her eyelids, dropped fathom deep and forgotten in the gaze of her pure and tender eyes.  It was not the Lucia of their last meeting; the tragic and terrible Lucia who had been so divided from him by her suffering and her grief.  As she had appeared