n of aloof
indifference.

Confused, conscious that something had happened which she did not
comprehend, and sensitively aware of the preoccupation which, if it did
not ignore her, accepted her presence as of no consequence, she
permitted her horse to set his own pace.

Neither self-command nor self-control was lacking now in Selwyn; he
simply was too self-absorbed to care what she thought--whether she
thought at all. And into his consciousness, throbbing heavily under the
rushing reaction from shock, crowded the crude fact that Alixe was no
longer an apparition evoked in sleeplessness, in sun-lit brooding;
in the solitude of crowded avenues and swarming streets; she
was an actual presence again in his life--she was here, bodily,
unchanged--unchanged!--for he had conceived a strange idea that she must
have changed physically, that her appearance had altered. He knew it was
a grotesquely senseless idea, but it clung to him, and he had nursed it
unconsciously.

He had, truly enough, expected to encounter her in life
again--somewhere; though what he had been preparing to see, Heaven alone
knew; but certainly not the supple, laughing girl he had known--that
smooth, slender, dark-eyed, dainty visitor who had played at marriage
with him through a troubled and unreal dream; and was gone when he
awoke--so swift the brief two years had passed, as swift in sorrow as in
happiness.

Two vision-tinted years!--ended as an hour ends with the muffled chimes
of a clock, leaving the air of an empty room vibrant. Two years!--a
swift, restless dream aglow with exotic colour, echoing with laughter
and bugle-call and the noise of the surf on Samar rocks--a dream through
which stirred the rustle of strange brocades and the whisper of breezes
blowing over the grasses of Leyte; and the light, dry report of rifles,
and the shuffle of bare feet in darkened bungalows, and the whisper of
dawn in Manila town.

Two years!--wherever they came from, wherever they had gone. And now,
out of the ghostly, shadowy memory, behold _her_ stepping into the world
again!--living, breathing, quickening with the fire of life undimmed in
her. And he had seen the bright colour spreading to her eyes, and the
dark eyes widen to his stare; he had seen the vivid blush, the forced
smile, the nod, the voiceless parting of her stiffened lips. Then she
was gone, leaving the whole world peopled with her living presence and
the very sky ringing with the words her lips ha