Mrs. Stewart, after his death, realized all that he had been to her, all that she, except in his loving fancy, had not been to him. And brooding over such recollections she began to feel the ban of morbidness, the old rooms, the dear, familiar haunts that had once known his voice, were peopled now with sadness, and she resolved to seek escape, for a time at least, from these living voices of a silenced lip. She had some cousins in London; she determined to travel, to visit them. With her went her nearer cousin, Miss Leigh, whose whimsical, cynical sincerities she loved the while she combated them.
So, in the spring, they found themselves in London, then harboring the whirl of society at its swiftest. But that had palled on Mrs. Stewart, and she dragged Miss Leigh off for an apparently aimless tour through Wales, and the Lake district, and on up to Scotland.
Although it was one of the months that constitute the "short season" of that dear old academic village, it was easily possible to escape the crowds of golf-enthusiasts that studded the links with their glaringly colorful costumes. The old castle, the ruins of the cathedral, the legends of the historic, bloody occurrences that had taken place here for religion's sake,--all these were full of charms to these two American women, saturated, as is nearly all that Nation, with a peculiar, wistful reverence for things antique.
There were drives, too, that gave opportunities for enjoyment of the Scotch autumn scenery. Along the banks of the Tay, with the solemn Crampians showing dim in the distance.
Mrs. Stewart loved to sit in the silent coolness of the college quadrangles and dream. It seemed to her that only for such places were dreams fit companions.
One day, they were sitting together on the turf that once had marked a cathedral wall. Miss Leigh was reading; Mrs. Stewart idly watching the breakers roll up to the cliffs.
The two ladies looked up, and turned to find Lancaster standing before them, with his hat off and a look of amused surprise on his face.
"Well," said Mrs. Stewart, shaking hands heartily, "the world is small as ever, is it not? It's like home, seeing you!"
"It strikes me the same way." He sat down beside them. They noticed that he was browned and furrowed; the marks of travel, the brace of different climes, the scars caught in the thick of life's battle were all sharply dominant in his externals.