French window that gave on to the lawn. The grey
lady softly undid the catch.

"That will be an easy way out for you, if necessary," she said. "If
anybody comes in here you can slip out into the garden. And now, Philip,
how did you find me?"

Berrington made no reply for the moment. He was looking at the pale
features of his companion with something like a lovelight in his eyes.
Looked at closely it was a beautiful face, despite its sorrow and the
grey hair that crowned it. Berrington recollected the grey lady as a
merry laughing girl, who seemed not to have a single care in the world.
His mind was very far away from Audley Place at that moment.

"How long since we last met, Mary!" he said.

The woman sighed and her eyes filled with tears. Berrington had struck a
tender cord.

"Four months, four years, four centuries!" she said with a passionate
catch of her voice. "You are not angry with me, Phil? I can see you are
not angry with me."

"My dearest, no. When I look at you I can feel no anger in my heart
against you. My God, what you must have suffered! The same and yet so
different. All your colour has gone, the laughter from your eyes, the
tender lines of your mouth. And yet at the outside your years cannot be
more than thirty."

"Thirty-one," the other said mournfully. "And yet I seem to have lived
such a long, long life. You think that I treated you very badly, Phil?"

"My dear Mary, how could I come to any other conclusion? You were
engaged to me, we were going to be married, the very hour was fixed.
Then you disappeared utterly, leaving nothing more than a note to say
that I was to forget you and not seek you. I was to think of you as
being utterly unworthy to become a good man's wife."

"If you had done so a great deal of trouble and anxiety would have been
saved, Phil."

"Yes, but I declined to do anything of the kind," Berrington said
eagerly. "I knew that in some way you were sacrificing yourself for
others. And when I found that your brother had gone, I felt absolutely
certain of it."

"Did you discover anything about him?" the grey lady asked anxiously.

"Dear Mary, there was nothing fresh to discover. Your love for Carl made
you blind to his faults. Did we not all know what he was! Every man in
India who knew him could have told you. It is a painful thing to say,
but he was an utter blackguard. But for influence, he had been expelled
the Civil Service long before he chose to vanish. It used t