before her, tanned, lean from physical
hardships, strange-looking and yet familiar. Instead of a small
mustache intended to be debonaire, he had a heavy one; his shoulders
were wider and straighter than formerly; he advanced with a quick,
swinging step.

"Cornie Rysbroek!"

She laid her palms, on the new shoulders of this friend of her
childhood, and flooded him with her victorious smile.

"What have you done to yourself?" she laughed, rather wildly. "Where
do you come from? India?"

"I went on to China."

He had traveled up the Yangtze River, had crossed Tse-Chouan, had
reached the borders of Thibet. Her happy look continued to embrace
him; but she hardly heard what he said. She did not perceive that he
had undertaken that journey in imitation of the other--perhaps in the
hope of finding in those distant, hard places the secret of Lawrence
Teck's attractiveness. And, in fact, he looked stronger in spirit as
well as in body. The hypochondriac, the timid dilettante, seemed to
have slunk away; in his place stood a man who had forced himself,
against all his natural instincts, to endure extremes of cold and heat,
dirt and famine, hardship and danger. Even now his face was calm; but
he could not keep his eyes from shining at her.

"You'll stay to dinner, Cornie. Just us."

From the doorway she came rushing back to throw her arms round him, and
cry like a delighted child:

"Dear old Cornie! I'm so happy!"

CHAPTER XXV

As for David Verne, despite the extraordinary prostration in which
Lilla had found him, it seemed that he had not passed beyond the
vivifying powers of love, which sometimes appear to change the body, as
well as the mind, into a new organism for a while. Week after week, to
the bewilderment--one might almost say the consternation--of the
physician, he refused to imitate the customary progress of that disease
which had been diagnosed as his. And while he acknowledged that this
phenomenon must presently end, David knew that for the moment, at any
rate, love had proved stronger than death.

To prolong these hours in the transfigured world of sense! To steal
from oblivion one more summer of which she would be the warmth, the
fragrance, the unprecedented beauty!

In appearing to him she had embodied all that seductiveness which he
had formerly perceived at random, fragmentarily and vaguely, in a
change of light on the sea, in a spread of landscape, in the grace of
animals or the