trained me from
uttering or caring to utter it. But it was wonderful. It thrust me back
on Providence again for the explanation--humbly this time. It was
wonderful and blessed, as to loving eyes the first-drawn breath of a
drowned creature restored to life. I kissed her hand. 'Wait till you have
heard everything, Harry,' she said, and her voice was deeper, softer,
exquisitely strange in its known tones, as her manner was, and her eyes.
She was not the blooming, straight-shouldered, high-breathing girl of
other days, but sister to the day of her 'Good-bye, Harry,' pale and
worn. The eyes had wept. This was Janet, haply widowed. She wore no garb
nor a shade of widowhood. Perhaps she had thrown it off, not to offend an
implacable temper in me. I said, 'I shall hear nothing that can make you
other than my own Janet--if you will?'

She smiled a little. 'We expected Temple's arrival sooner than yours,
Harry!'

'Do you take to his Lucy?'

'Yes, thoroughly.'

The perfect ring of Janet was there.

Mention of Riversley made her conversation lively, and she gave me
moderately good news of my father, quaint, out of Julia Bulsted's latest
letter to her.

'Then how long,' I asked astonished, 'how long have you been staying with
the princess?'

She answered, colouring, 'So long, that I can speak fairish German.'

'And read it easily?'

'I have actually taken to reading, Harry.'

Her courage must have quailed, and she must have been looking for me on
that morning of miserable aspect when I beheld the last of England
through wailful showers, like the scene of a burial. I did not speak of
it, fearing to hurt her pride, but said, 'Have you been here--months?'

'Yes, some months,' she replied.

'Many?'

'Yes,' she said, and dropped her eyelids, and then, with a quick look at
me, 'Wait for Temple, Harry. He is a day behind his time. We can't
account for it.'

I suggested, half in play, that perhaps he had decided, for the sake of a
sea voyage, to come by our old route to Germany on board the barque
Priscilla, with Captain Welsh.

A faint shudder passed over her. She shut her eyes and shook her head.

Our interview satisfied my heart's hunger no further. The Verona's
erratic voyage had cut me off from letters.

Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew. She was always Janet to me; but
why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the princess?
Was she neither maid nor widow--a wife flown from a brutal husband