ent wore
away, he made another dreadful discovery. He still loved her and
longed for her just as keenly as before. He wanted madly to see
her--her flower-like face, her great, asking eyes, the sleek, braided
flow of her hair. Ghost or woman--spirit or flesh--it mattered not. He
could not live without her. At last his hunger for her drew him to the
old grey house on the bay shore. He knew he was a fool--she would
never look at him; he was only feeding the flame that must consume
him. But go he must and did, seeking for his lost paradise.

He did not see her when he went in, but Mrs. Barr received him kindly
and talked about her in a pleasant garrulous fashion which jarred on
Roger, yet he listened greedily. Lilith, her aunt told him, had been
made deaf by the accidental explosion of a gun when she was eight
years old. She could not hear a sound but she could talk.

"A little, that is--not much, but enough to get along with. But she
don't like talking somehow--dunno why. She's shy--and we think maybe
she don't like to talk much because she can't hear her own voice. She
don't ever speak except just when she has to. But she's been trained
to lip-reading something wonderful--she can understand anything that's
said when she can see the person that's talking. Still, it's a
terrible drawback for the poor child--she's never had any real
girl-life and she's dreadful sensitive and retiring. We can't get her
to go out anywhere, only for lonely walks along shore by herself.
We're much obliged for what you did the other night. It ain't safe for
her to wander about alone as she does, but it ain't often anybody from
the harbour gets up this far. She was dreadful upset about it--hasn't
got over her scare yet."

When Lilith came in, her ivory-white face went scarlet all over at the
sight of Roger. She sat down in a shadowy corner. Mrs. Barr got up
and went out. Roger was mute; he could find nothing to say. He could
have talked glibly enough to Isabel Temple's ghost in some unearthly
tryst by her grave, but he could not find a word to say to this slip
of flesh and blood. He felt very foolish and absurd, and very
conscious of his twisted shoulder. What a fool he had been to come!

Then Lilith looked up at him--and smiled. A little shy, friendly
smile. Roger suddenly saw her not as the tantalizing, unreal, mystic
thing of the twilit grove, but as a little human creature, exquisitely
pretty in her young-moon beauty, longing for companion