th your wife beside, and your divorced wife opposite you,
and only you and I knowing it. I suppose you think, somehow--I don't
know--that I might be jealous of your wife. But twenty-seven years make
a difference, Adam. It's half a lifetime. It's so utterly past that I
sha'n't realise it. If you like to stay, then stay. No harm can come of
it, and that was so very long ago. Is that what you want to say?"

"No." He hesitated. "I want you to say that you forgive me," he said, in
a quick, hoarse voice.

His keen dark eyes turned quickly to her face, and he saw how very pale
she was, and how the shadows had deepened under her eyes, and her
fingers twitched nervously as they clasped one another in her lap.

"I suppose you think I'm sentimental," he said, looking at her. "Perhaps
I am; but it would mean a good deal to me if you would just say it."

There was something pathetic in the appeal, and something young too, in
spite of his grey beard and furrowed face. Still Mrs. Bowring said
nothing. It meant almost too much to her, even after twenty-seven
years. This old man had taken her, an innocent young girl, had married
her, had betrayed her while she dearly loved him, and had blasted her
life at the beginning. Even now it was hard to forgive. The suffering
was not old, and the sight of his face had touched the quick again.
Barely ten minutes had passed since the pain had almost wrung the tears
from her.

"You can't," said the old man, suddenly. "I see it. It's too much to
ask, I suppose, and I've never done anything to deserve it."

The pale face grew paler, but the hands were still, and grasped each
other, firm and cold. The lips moved, but no sound came. Then a moment,
and they moved again.

"You're mistaken, Adam. I do forgive you."

He caught the two hands in his, and his face shivered.

"God bless you, dear," he tried to say, and he kissed the hands twice.

When Mrs. Bowring looked up he was sitting beside her, just as before;
but his face was terribly drawn, and strange, and a great tear had
trickled down the furrowed brown cheek into the grey beard.

CHAPTER XI

Lady Johnstone was one of those perfectly frank and honest persons who
take no trouble to conceal their anxieties. From the fact that when she
had met him on the way up to the hotel Brook had been walking alone with
Clare Bowring, she had at once argued that a considerable intimacy
existed between the two. Her meeting with Clare's mother, an