two strange hands that had both repelled
and coerced each other--faltering at last into that long moment of
triumphant certainty.

Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew
in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.
Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless
above this present clasp--the yielding, yet opposing, of those
all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual
look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little
awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.

They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic
watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of
this or that esteemed fleshpot.

Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the
returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and
the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during
the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known,
with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in
the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a
face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that
one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next,
coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.

As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming
forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from
inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman--listening, waiting,
judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the
perfect whole out of many little imperfections.

Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to
a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer
relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered
presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even
his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she
listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far
night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled
together--with such prescience that through all the years her hand was
to feel the groping of his.

Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by
side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the
lawn stretched unbroken to the other big h