Bellston.'
'I--ought to have expected it.' He was going to add, 'And is he dead?'
but he checked himself. Her dress unmistakably suggested widowhood; and
she had said she was free.
'I must now hasten home,' said she. 'I felt that, considering my
shortcomings at our parting so many years ago, I owed you the initiative
now.'
'There is some of your old generosity in that. I'll walk with you, if I
may. Where are you living, Christine?'
'In the same house, but not on the old conditions. I have part of it on
lease; the farmer now tenanting the premises found the whole more than he
wanted, and the owner allowed me to keep what rooms I chose. I am poor
now, you know, Nicholas, and almost friendless. My brother sold the
Froom-Everard estate when it came to him, and the person who bought it
turned our home into a farmhouse. Till my father's death my husband and
I lived in the manor-house with him, so that I have never lived away from
the spot.'
She was poor. That, and the change of name, sufficiently accounted for
the inn-servant's ignorance of her continued existence within the walls
of her old home.
It was growing dusk, and he still walked with her. A woman's head arose
from the declivity before them, and as she drew nearer, Christine asked
him to go back.
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