He had accused her of failing to rise superior to arbitrary social distinctions, and now, standing behind her in the fire-lit dining-room of the rectory, he retracted that accusation once and for all time in his own heart, though her justification came from a contrary direction to that from which it might have been expected.
Miriam alone remained a friend--and nothing else, he added, bitterly, in his own heart.

And she seemed to assume that their friendship, begun in face of social distinctions, should never have to suffer from that burthen.
"I should like to hear," she repeated, seeing that he was silent, "all that has happened since you went away; all that you may care to tell me." "My heritage, you mean ?" She moved in her seat but did not look round.

She had laid aside her hat on coming into the house, and as she sat, leaning forward with her hands clasped together in her lap, gazing thoughtfully at the fire which glowed blue and white for the salt water that was in the drift-wood, her hair, loosened by the wind, half concealed her face.
"Yes," she answered, slowly.
"Do you know what it is--my heritage ?" lapsing, as he often did when hurried by some pressing thought, into a colloquialism half French.
She shook her head, but made no audible reply.
"Do you suspect what it is ?" he insisted.
"I may have suspected, perhaps," she admitted, after a pause.
"When?
How long ?" She paused again.

Quick and clever as he was, she was no less so.

She weighed the question.