Waymark, on his side, whilst he talked, was not less full of
speculation about Maud. For the change in her appearance was
certainly much more noticeable than it could be in his own. Not only
that she had put aside her sad-coloured and poor raiment for a
costume of tasteful and attractive simplicity--this, of course,
her mother's doing--but the look of shrinking, almost of fear,
which he had been wont to see on her face, was entirely gone. Her
eyes seemed for ever intelligent of new meanings; she was pale, but
with the pallor of eager, joy-bringing thought. There was something
pathetic in this new-born face; the lips seemed still to speak of
past sorrows, or, it might be, to hold unspoken a sad fate
half-foreseen.
If this renewal of acquaintanceship came just at the right time for
Maud, it was no less welcome to Waymark. When he wrote his last
letter to her, it had proceeded more from a sense of obligation than
any natural impulse. For he was then only just recovering from a
period of something like despair. His pursuit of Ida Starr to London
had been fruitless. It was true that she had left her former abode,
and the landlady professed to be ignorant of her new one, though she
admitted that she had seen Ida scarcely two hours before Waymark's
arrival.
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