man, and she still little better than a poor governess.

She did not think very much of worldly things, but still she was aware of
this fact--that he was rich and she was poor. She did not suffer herself
to dwell upon it, but the consciousness was there, sustained with a
certain feeling called "proper pride." The conviction was forced upon
her in the very first days of Mr. Roy's return--that to go back to the
days of their youth was as impossible as to find primroses in September.

If, indeed, there were any thing to go back to. Sometimes she felt, if
she could only have found out that, all the rest would be easy, painless.
If she could only have said to him, "Did you write me the letter you
promised? Did you _ever_ love me"? But that one question was, of course,
utterly impossible. He made no reference whatever to old things, but
seemed resolved to take up the present a very peaceful and happy present
it soon grew to be--just as if there were no past at all. So perforce
did she.

But, as I think I have said once before, human nature is weak, and there
were days when the leaves were budding, and the birds singing in the
trees, when the sun was shining and the waves rolling in upon the sands,
just as they rolled in that morning over those two lines of foot-marks,
which might have walked together through life; and who knows what mutual
strength, help, and comfort this might have proved to both?--then it was,
for one at least, rather hard.

Especially when, bit by bit, strange ghostly fragments of his old self
began to re-appear in Robert Roy: his keen delight in nature, his love
of botanical or geological excursions. Often he would go wandering down
the familiar shore for hours in search of marine animals for the girls'
aquarium, and then would come and sit down at their tea-table, reading or
talking, so like the Robert Roy of old that one of the little group, who
always crept in the background, felt dizzy and strange, as if all her
later years had been a dream, and she were living her youth over again,
only with the difference aforesaid: a difference sharp as that between
death and life--yet with something of the peace of death in it.

Sometimes, when they met at the innocent little tea parties which St.
Andrews began to give--for of course in that small community every body
knew every body, and all their affairs to boot, often a good deal better
than they did themselves, so that there was great excitement and