“‘The Dardanelles,’” he began, smiling a little as though at the recollection, “was where I met her, thus recovered. Not on the way from Smyrna to Constantinople; oh, no! It was not romantic in that little sense. ‘The Dardanelles’ was a small and ugly red-brick villa in Upper Norwood, with a drive ten yards long, ragged laurel bushes, and a green five-barred gate, gold-lettered. Maennlich lives there--the Semitic language man and Egyptologist; you know. She was his parlour-maid at the time, and before that had been lady’s-maid to the daughter of some undistinguished duchess. In this way,” he laughed softly, “may old souls wait upon the young ones sometimes! Her father,” he continued, “was a market-gardener and fruiterer in a largish way at East Croydon, and she herself had been brought up upon the farm whence his supplies came. ‘Chance,’ as they call it, led her into these positions I have mentioned, and so, inevitably--to me.”
He looked up at me a moment. “And so to you as well.”
His manner was composed and serious. He spoke with the simple conviction of some Christian who traces the Hand of God in the smallest details of his daily life, and seeks His guidance in his very train journeys. There was something rather superb about it all.
“A fruiterer in East Croydon! A maid in service! And--you knew--you recognised her?”
“At once. The very first day she let me in at the front door and asked if I wished to see her master, what name she might announce, and so forth.”
“It was all--er--unexpected and sudden like that?” came the question from a hundred others that crowded together in me. “To find a lost friend of years only--in such a way--the shock, I mean, to you----!” I simply could not find my words. He told it all so calmly, naturally. “You were wholly unprepared, weren’t you? Nothing had led you to expect?” I ended with a dash.
“Not wholly unprepared,” was his rejoinder; “nor was the meeting altogether unexpected--on my side, that is. Intimations, as I told you at Motfield Close twenty years ago--when she was born--had come to me. No soul draws breath for the first time, without a quiver of response running through all that lives. Souls intimately connected with each other may feel the summons. There are ways----! I knew that she was once more in the world, that, like ourselves, her soul had reincarnated; and ever since I have been searching----”