ingingly close. It
was the seal of their situation--of which he tasted the impress for a
long blissful moment in silence. But he came back. "Yet how did you
know--?"

"I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember--and you had sent no
word."

"Yes, I remember--I was to have gone to you at one to-day." It caught on
to their "old" life and relation--which were so near and so far. "I was
still out there in my strange darkness--where was it, what was it? I
must have stayed there so long." He could but wonder at the depth and
the duration of his swoon.

"Since last night?" she asked with a shade of fear for her possible
indiscretion.

"Since this morning--it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day.
Where have I been," he vaguely wailed, "where have I been?" He felt her
hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all
security his mild moan. "What a long dark day!"

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. "In the cold dim dawn?"
she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole
prodigy. "As I didn't turn up you came straight--?"

She barely cast about. "I went first to your hotel--where they told me
of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn't been back
since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club."

"So you had the idea of _this_--?"

"Of what?" she asked in a moment.

"Well--of what has happened."

"I believed at least you'd have been here. I've known, all along," she
said, "that you've been coming."

"'Known' it--?"

"Well, I've believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a
month ago--but I felt sure. I knew you _would_," she declared.

"That I'd persist, you mean?"

"That you'd see him."

"Ah but I didn't!" cried Brydon with his long wail. "There's somebody--an
awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it's not me."

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. "No--it's
not you." And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made
out in it, hadn't it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a
smile. "No, thank heaven," she repeated, "it's not you! Of course it
wasn't to have been."

"Ah but it _was_," he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as
he had been staring for so many weeks. "I was to have known myself."

"You couldn't!" she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if
to account further for