ps of
each, she stooped and patted reassuringly the trembling hands before
she stepped a pace away from him.

"You've not forgotten, dear. Why, you mustn't be frightened like that!
We know, you and I, don't we, that you never could forget? You're just
tired. Now, that's better--that's brave! And now--look! Isn't this the
way--isn't this the way it ought to be?"

Face uptilted, bloodless lips falling apart in the faintest of pallid
smiles, she swayed forward, both arms outstretched toward him. And as
she stood the wide eyes and straight nose and delicately pointed chin
of her colorless face took line for line the lines of all those,
chalky white, against the wall.

For a moment John Anderson's eyes clung to her--clung vacant with
hopeless doubt; then they glowed again with dawning recollection. He,
too, was smiling once more as his fingers fluttered in nervous haste
above the lips of the clay face on the bench before him, and almost
before the girl had stepped back beside him he had forgotten that she
was there.

"Marie!" she heard him murmur. "Marie, why, you mustn't be afraid!
We'll never forget--you and I--we never could forget!"

Even while she waited another instant those plastic earthen lips began
to curl--they began to curve with hungry longing like all the rest. He
was talking steadily now, mumbling broken fragments of sentences which
it was hard to understand. Her hand hovered a moment longer over his
bowed head; once at the door she paused and looked back at him.

"It's only for a little while," she promised unsteadily. "I--I have to
go--but it's only for a little while. I'll be back soon--so soon! And
you'll be safe until I come!"

He gave no sign that he had heard, not even so much as a lifted
glance. But as she drew the door shut behind her she heard him pick
up the words, caressingly, after her.

"You'll be safe, Marie," he whispered. "It'll be only for a little
while, now. You'll be safe till I come." An ineffably peaceful smile
flickered across his face. "We couldn't forget--why, of course, we
couldn't forget--you and I!"

With the short black skirt lifted even higher above her ankles that
she might make still more speed, Dryad turned into the dark path that
twisted crookedly through the brush to the open clearing beside the
brook and from there on to the black house on the hill.

She ran swiftly, madly, through the darkness, with the wild,
panic-stricken, headlong abandon of a hunted thing,