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“It must have been that I was.” He made it out as she held him. “Yes–I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only,” he wondered, his eyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?”

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything.

“And now I keep you,” she said.

“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situation–of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back. “Yet how did you know–?”

“I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember–and you had sent no word.”

“Yes, I remember–I was to have gone to you at one to-day.” It caught on to their “old” life and relation–which were so near and so far. “I was still out there in my strange darkness–where was it, what was it? I must have stayed there so long.” He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.

“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.

“Since this morning–it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day. Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “where have I been?” He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. “What a long dark day!”

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. “In the cold dim dawn?” she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. “As I didn’t turn up you came straight–?”

She barely cast about. “I went first to your hotel–where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn’t been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club.”

“So you had the idea of this–?”

“Of what?” she asked in a moment.

“Well–of what has happened.”

“I believed at least you’d have been here. I’ve known, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”

“‘Known’ it–?”

“Well, I’ve believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago–but I felt sure. I knew you would,” she declared.

“That I’d persist, you mean?”

“That you’d see him.”

“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail. “There’s somebody–an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it’s not me.”

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. “No–it’s not you.” And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. “No, thank heaven,” she repeated, “it’s not you! Of course it wasn’t to have been.”

“Ah but it was,” he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. “I was to have known myself.”

“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, “But it wasn’t only that, that you hadn’t been at home,” she went on. “I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intentions–“it wasn’t only that.”