his head.

"After a little--after a little while," he had said. "I--I want to
think a little first."

It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have
frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told
herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless
mind.

But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her
then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than
before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their
dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.

"You have to go," John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible
whisper. "You have to go--but you'll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And
I'll be safe till you come!"

Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as
he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased
even to hope had come that night. And then she understood--she knew
that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had
only repeated her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced
together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the
window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of
that other night.

And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere
witless repetition. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling
like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still
untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face,
nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers
had always heralded before. He was just smiling--vaguely to be sure
and a little uncertainly--but smiling in utter contentment and
satisfaction, for all that.

Very slowly--wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about
his white head and drew it against her.

"I think you knew," she said to him, unsteadily. "I think you are able
to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do
have to go--I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell
him some day--that I was with him tonight."

The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently.
And he nodded--nodded as though he had understood. She paused and
looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always
hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his
head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he
might have been.

"Some day," he rei