The ground sloped steeply away to the left, and slowly mounting the
hillside came mildly on an old lady he knew, a Miss Sinnet, an old
friend of his mother’s. There was just such a little seat as that other
he knew so well, on the brow of the hill. He made his way to it,
intending to sit quietly there until the little old lady had passed by. Up and up she came. Her large bonnet appeared, and then her mild white
face, inclined a little towards him as she ascended. Evidently this
very seat was her goal; and evasion was impossible. Evasion!... Memory
rushed back and set his pulses beating. He turned boldly to the sun,
and the old lady, with a brief glance into his face, composed herself
at the other end of the little seat. She gazed out of a gentle reverie
into the golden valley. And so they sat a while. And almost as if she
had felt the bond of acquaintance between them, she presently sighed,
and addressed him: ‘A very, very, beautiful view, sir.’

Lawford paused, then turned a gloomy, earnest face, gilded with
sunshine. ‘Beautiful, indeed,’ he said, ‘but not for me. No, Miss
Sinnet, not for me.’

The old lady gravely turned and examined the aquiline profile. ‘Well, I
confess,’ she remarked urbanely, ‘you have the advantage of me.’

Lawford smiled uneasily. ‘Believe me, it is little advantage.’

‘My sight,’ said Miss Sinnet precisely, ‘is not so good as I might
wish; though better perhaps than I might have hoped; I fear I am not
much wiser; your face is still unfamiliar to me.’

‘It is not unfamiliar to me,’ said Lawford. Whose trickery was this? he
thought, putting such affected stuff into his mouth. A faint lightening of pity came into the silvery and scrupulous
countenance. ‘Ah, dear me, yes,’ she said courteously. Lawford rested a lean hand on the seat. ‘And have you,’ he asked, ‘not
the least recollection in the world of my face?’

‘Now really,’ she said, smiling blandly, ‘is that quite fair? Think of
all the scores and scores of faces in seventy long years; and how very
treacherous memory is. You shall do me the service of _reminding_ me of
one whose name has for the moment escaped me.’

‘I am the son of a very old friend of yours, Miss Sinnet,’ said Lawford
quietly ‘a friend that was once your schoolfellow at Brighton.’

‘Well, now,’ said the old lady, grasping her umbrella, ‘that is
undoubtedly a clue; but then, you see, all but one of the friends of my
girlhood are dead; and if I have never had the pleasure of meeting her
son, unless there is a decided resemblance, how am I to recollect _her_
by looking at _him?_’

‘There is, I believe, a likeness,’ said Lawford. She nodded her great bonnet at him with gentle amusement. ‘You are
insistent in your fancy. Well, let me think again. The last to leave me
was Fanny Urquhart, that was—let me see—last October. Now you are
certainly not Fanny Urquhart’s son,’ she stooped austerely, ‘for she
never had one. Last year, too, I heard that my dear, dear Mrs Jameson
was dead. _Her_ I hadn’t met for many, many years. But, if I may
venture to say so, yours is not a Scottish face; and she not only
married a Scottish husband, but was herself a Dunbar. No, I am still at
a loss.’

A miserable strife was in her chance companion’s mind, a strife of
anger and recrimination. He turned his eyes wearily to the fast
declining sun. ‘You will forgive my persistency, but I assure you it is
a matter of life or death to me. Is there no one my face recalls? My
voice?’

Miss Sinnet drew her long lips together, her eyebrows lifted with the
faintest perturbation. ‘But he certainly knows my name,’ she said to
herself. She turned once more, and in the still autumnal beauty,
beneath that pale blue arch of evening, these two human beings
confronted one another again. She eyed him blandly, yet with a certain
grave directness. ‘I don’t really think,’ she said, ‘you _can_ be Mary Lawford’s son. I
could scarcely have mistaken _him_.’

Lawford gulped and turned away. He hardly knew what this surge of
feeling meant. Was it hope, despair, resentment; had he caught even the
echo of an unholy joy? His mind for a moment became confused as if in
the tumult of a struggle. He heard himself expostulate, ‘Ah, Miss
Bennett, I fear I set you too difficult a task.’

The old lady drew abruptly in, like a trustful and gentle snail into
its shocked house. ‘Bennett, sir; but my name is not Bennett.’

And again Lawford accepted the miserable prompting. ‘Not Bennett!... How can I ever then apologise for so frantic a mistake?’

The little old lady took firm hold of her umbrella. She did not answer
him. ‘The likeness, the likeness!’ he began unctuously, and stopped,
for the glance that dwelt fleetingly on him was cold with the
formidable dignity and displeasure of age. He raised his hat and turned
miserably home. He strode on out of the last gold into the blue
twilight. What fantastic foolery of mind was mastering him? He cast a
hurried look over his shoulder at the kindly and offended old figure
sitting there, solitary, on the little seat, in her great bonnet, with
back turned resolutely upon him—the friend of his dead mother who might
have proved in his need a friend indeed to him. And he had by this
insane caprice hopelessly estranged her. She would remember this face well enough now, he thought bitterly, and
would take her place among his quiet enemies, if ever the day of
reckoning should come. It was scandalous, it was banal to have abused
her trust and courtesy. Oh, it was hopeless to struggle any more! The
fates were against him. They had played him a trick. He was to be their
transitory sport, as many a better man he could himself recollect had
been before him. He would go home and give in; let Sheila do with him
what she pleased. No one but a lunatic could have acted as he had, with
just that frantic hint of method so remarkable in the insane. He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin
evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that fateful
afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And
even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go
to the old green time-worn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly
alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the
yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his
only possible chance of recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila
had not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in
repeating so successful a stratagem. Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned
to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He
would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again. She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely
comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers,
some old keepsake of his mother’s.