"

And then something happened that brought his heart to a dead stop. He
was close to the door. His ear was against it. And he was listening to
a voice. It was not Wallie's, and it was not the iron man's. It was a
woman's voice, or a girl's.

He opened the door and entered, taking swiftly the two or three steps
that carried him across the tiny vestibule to the big room. His
entrance was so sudden that the tableau in front of him was unbroken
for a moment. Birch logs were blazing in the fireplace. In the big
chair sat McDowell, partly turned, a smoking cigar poised in his
fingers, staring at him. Seated on a footstool, with her chin in the
cup of her hands, was a girl. At first, blinded a little by the light,
Keith thought she was a child, a remarkably pretty child with
wide-open, half-startled eyes and a wonderful crown of glowing, brown
hair in which he could still see the shimmer of wet. He took off his
hat and brushed the water from his eyes. McDowell did not move. Slowly
the girl rose to her feet. It was then that Keith saw she was not a
child. Perhaps she was eighteen, a slim, tired-looking, little thing,
wonderfully pretty, and either on the verge of laughing or crying.
Perhaps it was halfway between. To his growing discomfiture she came
slowly toward him with a strange and wonderful look in her face. And
McDowell still sat there staring.

His heart thumped with an emotion he had no time to question. In those
wide-open, shining eyes of the girl he sensed unspeakable tragedy--for
him. And then the girl's arms were reaching out to him, and she was
crying in that voice that trembled and broke between sobs and laughter:

"Derry, don't you know me? Don't you know me?"

He stood like one upon whom had fallen the curse of the dumb. She was
within arm's reach of him, her face white as a cameo, her eyes glowing
like newly-fired stars, her slim throat quivering, and her arms
reaching toward him.

"Derry, don't you know me? DON'T YOU KNOW ME?"

It was a sob, a cry. McDowell had risen. Overwhelmingly there swept
upon Keith an impulse that rocked him to the depth of his soul. He
opened his arms, and in an instant the girl was in them. Quivering, and
sobbing, and laughing she was on his breast. He felt the crush of her
soft hair against his face, her arms were about his neck, and she was
pulling his head down and kissing him--not once or twice, but again and
again, passionately and without shame. His own arms tightened.