Only once, on the day of the Old Home Week
celebration, while the stray fragments of his address drifted across
her troubled mind, had she caught a glimpse of another being, a being so
different from the dull-witted enemy with whom she had supposed herself
to be living that even through the burning mist of her own dreams he
had stood out with startling distinctness. For a moment, then, what he
said--and something in his way of saying it--had made her see why he had
always struck her as such a lonely man. But the mist of her dreams had
hidden him again, and she had forgotten that fugitive impression.
It came back to her now, as they sat at the table, and gave her, through
her own immeasurable desolation, a sudden sense of their nearness to
each other. But all these feelings were only brief streaks of light in
the grey blur of her physical weakness. Through it she was aware that
Mr. Royall presently left her sitting by the table in the warm room, and
came back after an interval with a carriage from the station--a closed
"hack" with sun-burnt blue silk blinds--in which they drove together
to a house covered with creepers and standing next to a church with a
carpet of turf before it.
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