" I heard him mutter as she
turned and opened her eyes and smiled faintly up in his face. "I swear
the bullet went straight."

Joan stared at him; she was still dazed and bewildered, and still
imagined herself with the companion of her trance. The strange lucidity
of the somnambulist still hung over her brain and mind, though outwardly
she appeared troubled and confused.

"Where has he gone to? He disappeared so suddenly, crying that he was
hurt," she asked, looking at her father as though she did not recognise
him. "And if they've done anything to him--they have done it to me
too--for he is more to me than--"

Her words grew vaguer and vaguer as she returned slowly to her normal
waking state, and now she stopped altogether, as though suddenly aware
that she had been surprised into telling secrets. But all the way back,
as we carried her carefully through the trees, the girl smiled and
murmured Sangree's name and asked if he was injured, until it finally
became clear to me that the wild soul of the one had called to the wild
soul of the other and in the secret depths of their beings the call had
been heard and understood. John Silence was right. In the abyss of her
heart, too deep at first for recognition, the girl loved him, and had
loved him from the very beginning. Once her normal waking consciousness
recognised the fact they would leap together like twin flames, and his
affliction would be at an end; his intense desire would be satisfied; he
would be cured.

And in Sangree's tent Dr. Silence and I sat up for the remainder of the
night--this wonderful and haunted night that had shown us such strange
glimpses of a new heaven and a new hell--for the Canadian tossed upon
his balsam boughs with high fever in his blood, and upon each cheek a
dark and curious contusion showed, throbbing with severe pain although
the skin was not broken and there was no outward and visible sign of
blood.

"Maloney shot straight, you see," whispered Dr. Silence to me after the
clergyman had gone to his tent, and had put Joan to sleep beside her
mother, who, by the way, had never once awakened. "The bullet must have
passed clean through the face, for both cheeks are stained. He'll wear
these marks all his life--smaller, but always there. They're the most
curious scars in the world, these scars transferred by repercussion from
an injured Double. They'll remain visible until just before his death,
and then with the withdrawal of the subtl