Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/101
description which belonged to her former fellow-traveller. Often as in the course of the past ten years she had pictured in her thoughts a meeting with him, still she felt strangely reluctant to see him again, now that it seemed inevitable. Like the girl in the visionary poem, she said to herself:
Oh, is it thus we meet!”
Far different had been her imaginary circumstances. Then she was to be a star, a reigning sovereign, hardly to be recognized as the little Australian student of the “Suez.” Now she would meet him as a failure, out and out, as she repeated to herself. There were one or two circumstances which had softened the fall for her. She was, at all events, a fairly good-looking, well-dressed, popular failure, of independent means; but she could have borne the thought better if he too had also failed, or fallen ever so little out of the race; but no—
My path lies in the shade,”
she repeated silently; and then in a half rebound she thought of her good professor, so patient, so faithful, so determined not to take “No” for an answer; and besides her professor