Therefore he decided it would be waste of time for him to go in search of her, seeing that she must come back by the same way. Meanwhile he sat down on the top of the steps, and, lighting a cigarette, gave himself over to patient waiting. Some thirty minutes passed before he caught a glimpse of a moving figure amid some distant trees. The figure grew in size and in distinctness of outline,[Pg 83] and then he saw Lady Kathleen coming slowly towards him. [Pg 83] Her face was bent on the ground, and her whole figure seemed for the moment old and bowed. Her appearance, indeed, gave him a little pang of sorrow. He realised that when she saw him she must suffer some slight shock. That, however, was inevitable, and so he sat waiting for her to raise her head. Presently, as she came nearer the wall, she lifted up her eyes, and a little cry escaped her lips as she saw Westerham sitting there. She stopped dead in her walk and stood still, holding her hand against her heart. Westerham knew that she must have time to recover before he spoke, so he merely removed his hat and, moving forward, stood bareheaded before her. A little of her old spirit came back to her as she looked up at him. There was almost a glimmer of amusement in her eyes, but whatever humour she might have felt at his appearance was drowned in her obvious anxiety. She might well have been angry with him, but she kept her sad composure. “Do you think,” she asked, with an appealing gesture of her hands, “it is quite fair to torment me in this way?” “You would not ask me that,” said Westerham, “if you did believe me to be an honest man.” She passed her hand rather wearily across her forehead. “I hardly know,” she said in a slightly shaky voice,[Pg 84] “exactly what to think.” [Pg 84] She lifted her eyes again to his as though to search him through and through. “At any rate,” asked Westerham, with a smile, “have you a sufficiently good opinion of me to grant me just a few moments to say something?”
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