t, half
exultation, half terror. The exultation was accountable enough. The high
Gods had given him another chance. Why he should be terrified he did not
at the time know, but he was--from that very first moment.

He came to her slowly, not knowing what he was to do or say. All his
mental powers were for the moment quite in abeyance. But when he got
within hand's reach of her it was given to him to take both of hers and
stoop and kiss them. He'd have knelt to her had his knees ever been
habituated to prayer. Then he led her to his big hollow-backed easy chair
which stood in the dormer where the breeze came in, changed its position
a little and waited until, with a faintly audible sigh, she had let
herself sink into it.

How tired she was! He had become aware of that the moment he touched her
hands. Whatever her experience during the last days or weeks had been, it
had brought her to the end of her powers.

He felt another pang of that unaccountable terror as he turned away, and
he put up an unaddressed prayer for spiritual guidance. It was a new
humility for him. He moved his own chair a little nearer, but not close,
and seated himself.

"I can conceive of no message,"--they were the first words he had
spoken, and his voice was not easily manageable,--"no message that would
be more than nothing compared with the fact that you have come." Rising
again, he went on, "Won't you let me take your hat? Then the back of that
chair won't be in the way."

It was certainly a point in his favor that she took it off and gave it to
him without demur. That meant that there would be time; yet her very
docility frightened him. She seemed quite relaxed now that her head could
lie back against the leather cushion, and her gaze traveled about the
dingy littered room with a kind of tender inquisitiveness as if she were
memorizing its contents.

He gazed at her until a gush of tears blinded his eyes and he turned,
blinking them away, to the untidy quires of score paper which he had
tried to choose instead. It could not be that it was too late to alter
that choice. The terror, for a moment, became articulate. She believed
that it was too late. That was why she had come.

She spoke reflectively. "It would be called an accident, I suppose, that
I came. I wrote to you but there was more to the message than would go
easily in a note so I took it myself to your house. There was just a
chance, I thought, that I'd find you there. I didn't fi