The change wrought in both girls by the passage of those years, packed with destiny, was noticeably great. Gracie, who had been threatened, even at the time when Olwen went to Guysewyke, with a repetition of her mother’s unwieldy embonpoint, was now almost slender, fined down to a muscular trimness, the result of unremitting work. She was happily betrothed to a north country "Temporary Captain," who in peace time was a solicitor, and was now busily employed gathering up the threads of his interrupted practice in preparation for marriage.
Olwen bore more plainly still the traces of what she had gone through. Her face had acquired, as it were, new meanings. Her beauty, which had always been largely a matter of expression, was now much more evident than formerly. Those who met her for the first time never failed to be struck by her, to remember her voice, her look—"What a _memorable_ face Miss Innes has!" said old Lady Cumberdale when she came to visit her nephew, one of those officers who had implored Olwen to marry him. "I never remember to have seen an English girl with quite so much distinction; but she looks sad."
The remark was repeated to Olwen. She sighed, remembering who had once described her as a "dainty rogue in porcelain." Not much of the rogue was now left. Everyone always added that little conclusion to any criticism of her appearance. "She looks sad."
The sadness had been there throughout the weary months of war; but as long as the necessity of the moment kept her at work, it had been an undercurrent, far below the surface. Like the hopelessly estranged husband in "A Confession," she might have said:
"_Therefore I kept my memory down, by stress_ _Of work._"
But memory, howsoever held down, arose the moment the grip slackened, and stood upon her feet. Each day that passed seemed now to bring the heiress back a step, across the dim gulf of separation, to the re-living of the old days at the Pele.
Since the moment when, overlooking the balusters at Bramforth, she had seen the top of Ninian’s sleek black head, a little bent, as he moved to the door, no word of him had ever reached her. He might have stepped from the vicarage threshold clean over the rim of the world, for all she ever knew to the contrary.