stealing westward over the
quiet hills, came Eldris along the road toward Thorney, with an empty
basket on her arm. She looked younger, rounder, better fed; her eyes
were darkly blue and full of light, her skin as white as milk. Coming up
a slight rise of ground, she saw the long figure lying against the
hillside but a short distance away, and recognized it and stopped short,
turning white, with a hand against her heart, all unprepared for what
she had yearned to see. She went to him swiftly, and knelt beside him as
he slept.

"Thank God! He hath returned--he is alive and well!" she whispered. "I
had feared--oh, I know not what I feared! How hath he escaped? Ay me,
but he is changed! There is that in his face which was not there before,
and there is something gone from it. So thin he is--sure he hath been
ill."

She hung over him in rapt absorption of tenderness; she listened to his
slow and heavy breathing; she longed to draw his rough black head into
her arms. Yet she dared scarcely touch him, since even in sleep he was
still too much his own; rosy and shy she leaned above him, her face
transfigured. They were alone in the world, with gray empty skies above
them and gray silent hills rolling upon either hand.

With one finger she touched a lock of his hair, rough and matted, and
dearer to her than all silken tresses; and he lay as one dead, very far
from her. She whispered his name, but not for him to hear; at the
deepness of his slumber she became emboldened. She stroked the hair from
his forehead with mother-tender hands; her eyes brooded over him. He was
her god; out of his strength he had saved her when she was helpless, so
she murmured, ready, womanlike, to glorify; now he lay broken at her
feet, with lean lithe limbs relaxed, with lids down-dropped over the
gray sombre eyes which never had looked love into her eyes, with lips
still grim and set even in the unconsciousness of sleep. She bent her
head and with her lips touched the hair that she had smoothed. He
stirred, and she started, a guilty thing, crimsoned with shame; but he
did not wake. Her ears caught a word, as though in sleep he had felt a
warm presence near him.

"Beloved!"

And for a name she listened hungrily, but none came. Who had found a
place in that deep stern heart of his?--so she asked herself with a
small inward twinge of an emotion new and strange. For whom had his keen
eyes softened? Who had listened thralled to the silver speech whic