she
said.

She seemed to find further meanings in the speech and took it up again
with: "I suppose not. It's strange that we should never have met in all
these years, isn't it."

"Is it strange?"

"I've often felt it so: if you haven't, that is just part of your
acceptance. You have accepted everything. It has often made me indignant
to think of it."

Amabel sat in her high-backed chair near the table. Her hands were
tightly clasped together in her lap and her face, with the light from
the windows falling upon it, was very pale. But she knew that she was
calm; that she could meet Lady Elliston's kindness with an answering
kindness; that she was ready, even, to hear Lady Elliston's questions.
This, however, was not a question, and she hesitated for a moment before
saying: "I don't understand you."

"How well I remember that voice," Lady Elliston smiled a little sadly:
"It's the girl's voice of twenty years ago--holding me away. Can't we be
frank together, now, Amabel, when we are both middle-aged women?--at
least I am middle-aged.--How it has kept you young, this strange life
you've led."

"But, really, I do not understand," Amabel murmured, confused; "I didn't
understand you then, sometimes."

"Then I may be frank?"

"Yes; be frank, of course."

"It is only that indignation that I want to express," said Lady
Elliston, tentative no longer and firmly advancing. "Why are you here,
in this dismal room, this dismal house? Why have you let yourself be
cloistered like this? Why haven't you come out and claimed things?"

Amabel's grey eyes, even in their serenity always a little wild, widened
with astonishment. "Claimed?" she repeated. "What do you mean? What
could I have claimed? I have been given everything."

"My dear Amabel, you speak as if you had deserved this imprisonment."

There was another and a longer silence in which Amabel seemed slowly to
find meanings incredible to her before. And her reception of them was
expressed in the changed, the hardened voice with which she said: "You
know everything. I've always been sure you knew. How can you say such
things to me?"

"Do not be angry with me, dear Amabel. I do not mean to offend."

"You spoke as though you were sorry for me, as though I had been
injured.--It touches him."

"But," Lady Elliston had flushed very slightly, "it does touch him. I
blame Hugh for this. He ought not to have allowed it. He ought not to
have accepted such misplaced penitence.