They pass on. They have gone some steps--but Gertrude stands fixed to the spot. She feels a great throbbing at her heart. She knows that look, that voice, as well as if she had seen and heard them yesterday. Could Gertrude forget Willie Sullivan? But he has forgotten her. Shall she run after him and stop him, and catch both his hands in hers, and compel him to see, and know, and speak to her? She started one step forward in the direction he had taken, then suddenly paused and hesitated. A crowd of emotions choked, blinded, suffocated her, and while she wrestled with them, and they with her, he turned the corner and passed out of sight. She covered her face with her hands and leaned against a tree.
It was Willie. There was no doubt of that; but not her Willie--the _boy_ Willie. It was true time had added but little to his height or breadth of figure, for he was a well-grown youth when he went away. But six years of Eastern life, including no small amount of travel, care, exposure, and suffering, had done the work that time would ordinarily have accomplished. The winning attractiveness of the boy had but given place to equal, if not superior, qualities in the man, who was still very handsome, and gifted with that natural grace and ease of deportment which win universal commendation. The broad, open forehead, the lines of mild but firm decision about the mouth, the frank, fearless manner, were as marked as ever, and were alone sufficient to betray his identity to one upon whose memory these and all his other characteristics were indelibly stamped; and Gertrude needed not the sound of his well-known voice, that too fell upon her ear, to proclaim to her beating heart that Willie Sullivan had met her face to face, had passed on, and that she was left alone, unrecognised, unknown, unthought of, and uncared for!
For a time this bitter thought, "He does not know me," was present to her mind; it engrossed her entire imagination, and sent a thrill of surprise and agony through her whole frame. She did not stop to reflect upon the fact that she was but a child when she parted from him, and that the change in her appearance must be immense. The one painful idea, that she was forgotten and lost to the dear friend of her childhood, obliterated every other recollection. Other feelings, too, soon crowded into her mind. Why was Willie here, and with Isabel Clinton leaning on his arm? How came he on this side the ocean? and why had he not immediately sought herself, the earliest and, as she had supposed, almost the only friend, to welcome him back to his native land? Why had he not written and warned her of his coming? How should she account for his strange silence, and the still stranger circumstance of his hurrying at once to the haunts of fashion, without once visiting the city of his birth and the sister of his adoption?