"And so," Kathleen said, "we all have our troubles, our fears and our loves, Betty and I and all Eve’s daughters."
She dressed herself, it was no hardship or novelty to her.
She looked at herself in the glass without vanity, but rather with a curious interest.
"I’m twenty-eight," she said, "in a few months I shall be twenty-nine—yet I have no wrinkles and there are no silver threads yet—I wonder—I wonder does he think me much changed? He is changed, greatly changed, yet I knew him, of course I knew him; I should have known him among ten thousand, I should have known him had he come in rags and poverty, just as I knew him, now he has come to me in his prosperity and health and strength."
She went down the stairs, she went into the drawing room and found, as she had almost feared she would find, that he was there alone. He came forward eagerly to greet her.
"It would have been better, kinder to me if—if you had stayed away."
"And kinder to myself," he said bitterly. "Kathleen, do—do you think that this does not mean suffering to me?"
"Your father told me you—you knew and approved, that you would be glad to welcome me."
"But now I know that that was untrue; you did not know that I was coming——"
"I did not know," she said. "No, I did not know."
"Kathleen, Kathleen, you waited so long, all—all those years and yet not quite long enough; another few months, if only you had waited another few months, Kathleen."
She turned to him suddenly, her face bright, her cheeks flushed.
"You—you have seen him, my husband, you have taken his hand, you—you are here, his guest—our honoured guest—the past is dead and gone; I waited—ten years—" her voice broke for a moment, "then I looked at your letters for the last time and—and burned them all, and when I saw their black ashes in the grate, I knew that from that moment my new life began, a life that could not, must not, hold memories of a past. It was Fate and we—we must accept it; I have accepted it—so we—you and I—we meet again—as friends—" She held out her hand to him, she smiled at him.
He took her hand and held it tightly, he looked into her eyes, then he groaned, he bent his head and kissed the hand before he let it go, and then from beyond the door there came the sound of voices, Coombe’s loud and dominant, argumentative.