But the months went by without healing Paul's grief. Time only coated it with a dull, callous crust. He had got into a hard way of taking everything as it came. He did not fly from society, or ape the manners of the misanthrope; he went to London, and stayed about and played the game. But all with a stony, bald indifference which made people wonder.
No faintest inkling of his story had ever leaked out. And it seemed an incomprehensible attitude towards life for a young and fortunate man. Those who had looked for great things from his birthday speech shook their heads sadly at the unfulfilment.
So time passed on, until one day at the beginning of February, nearly five years after the light had gone out of his life, a circumstance happened which proved a turning-point of great magnitude.
It was quite a small thing--just the brutalised hardness in a gipsy woman's face!
The sun was setting that late afternoon when he strode home across the moor with Pike, and they came upon some gipsy vans. Paul looked up--it was no unaccustomed sight, only they happened to be in exactly the same spot where the like had stood that morning long ago, when in his exuberant happiness at the news of his little son's birth he had tossed the young woman the sovereign.
The door of the last van was open, and there, sitting on the steps in an attitude of dull sullen idleness, was the same swarthy lass, only now she was altered sadly! No more the proud young mother met his view, but a hard, gaunt, evil-looking woman.
She knew him instantly, and her black eyes fiercened; as he came up close to her she said without any greeting: "I lost him, your honour--him and my Bill in the same blasted year, and I ain't never had no other."
Paul stopped and peered into her brown face in the fading light.
"So we have been both through hell since then, my poor girl?" he said.
The gipsy woman laughed with bitter harshness as she echoed back the one word "Hell!"--and afterwards she added with a wail: "Yes, they're dead! and there won't be never no meeting."
And Paul went on--but her face haunted him.
Was there the same hard change in himself, he wondered? Was he, too, brutalised and branded with the five years of hell? Surely if so he had gone on a lower road than his darling would have had him travel.
Then out of the mist of the dying day came the memory of her noble face as it had been in that happy hour when they had floated out to the lagoon, and she had told him--her eyes alight with the feu sacré--her wishes for his future.