"Do you think I am afraid?" she asked, and her voice trembled, but not with fear. "No, I am looking back. Oh, Stephen, do you remember when we met first?"
"Yes, yes," said Stephen, soothingly, and with an anxious, sidelong look about--to be seen promenading the high road with a young woman on his arm on the night of his uncle's death would be the ruin of his carefully built-up reputation. "Yes, yes," he murmured. "Shall I ever forget? How fortunate you lost your way, Laura, and that you should have come up to me to ask it, and that I should have been going in that direction. And yet the thoughtless speak of chance!"
And he cast up his eyes with unctuous solemnity, though there was no one in the dark road to be impressed by it.
"Chance," said the girl, sadly--"an evil or a good chance for me--which? Stephen, I sometimes wish that we had never met--that I had not crossed your path, and so have left the old life, with its dull, quiet and sober grayness; but the die was cast that afternoon. I went back to the quiet home, to the old man who had been my father, mother and all to me, and life was changed."
"No, he trusts me entirely. If he asks a question when I go to meet you, he is satisfied when I tell him that I am going to a neighbor. Stephen, if I had had a mother, do you think I should have deceived her also?"
"Deceived? Deceived is too harsh a word, my dear Laura. We have been obliged, for various reasons, to use some reserve--let us say candidly, to conceal our engagement. You have not mentioned my name to anyone?" he broke off.
"Such concealment was necessary. My uncle was a man of rough and hasty temper, ill-judging and merciless."
"But," she said, with a sudden eagerness, and a slight shudder, "he--he is dead now, Stephen. There is no need for further concealment."
"Softly, softly, dear Laura. We must be patient--must keep our little secret a little while longer. I can trust my darling to confide in me--yes, yes, I know that----"
"Stephen, to-night for the first time--why, I know not--I have doubted--no, not doubted, for I have fought hard against the suspicion that I was wrong to trust you."
"You were wrong to leave me for so long without a word--you put my love to too severe a test. I--I cannot say whether it has stood it or not. To-night I am full of doubt. Stephen--look at me!"