" Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis flashed it on
my brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freak
of memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There the
word stands in my memory, as if it were written in fire.
We came to the door of Lady Osprey's garden at last, and it was
beginning to drizzle.
She held out her hands and I took them.
"Yours," she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; "all that I had--such
as it was. Will you forget?"
"Never," I answered.
"Never a touch or a word of it?"
"No."
"You will," she said.
We looked at one another in silence, and her face full of fatigue and
misery.
What could I do? What was there to do?
"I wish--" I said, and stopped.
"Good-bye."
IV
That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destined
to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I forget
altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the station
believing her to be gone away she came upon me, and she was riding with
Carnaby, just as I had seen them first.
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