ain into her eyes. He had
seen such a look in the eyes of creatures physically hurt. He reached
out with his hands and brushed back the thick, soft hair from about her
face. His fingers buried themselves in the silken disarray, and he
looked for a moment straight into her eyes before he spoke.

"Little girl, will you tell me the truth?" he asked. "Do I look like
the old Derwent Conniston, YOUR Derwent Conniston? Do I?"

Her voice was small and troubled, yet the pain was slowly fading out of
her eyes as she felt the passionate embrace of his fingers in her hair.
"No. You are changed."

"Yes, I am changed. A part of Derwent Conniston died seven years ago.
That part of him was dead until he came through that door tonight and
saw you. And then it flickered back into life. It is returning slowly,
slowly. That which was dead is beginning to rouse itself, beginning to
remember. See, little Mary Josephine. It was this!"

He drew a hand to his forehead and placed a finger on the scar. "I got
that seven years ago. It killed a half of Derwent Conniston, the part
that should have lived. Do you understand? Until tonight--"

Her eyes startled him, they were growing so big and dark and staring,
living fires of understanding and horror. It was hard for him to go on
with the lie. "For many weeks I was dead," he struggled on. "And when I
came to life physically, I had forgotten a great deal. I had my name,
my identity, but only ghastly dreams and visions of what had gone
before. I remembered you, but it was in a dream, a strange and haunting
dream that was with me always. It seems to me that for an age I have
been seeking for a face, a voice, something I loved above all else on
earth, something which was always near and yet was never found. It was
you, Mary Josephine, you!"

Was it the real Derwent Conniston speaking now? He felt again that
overwhelming force from within which was not his own. The thing that
had begun as a lie struck him now as a thing that was truth. It was he,
John Keith, who had been questing and yearning and hoping. It was John
Keith, and not Conniston, who had returned into a world filled with a
desolation of loneliness, and it was to John Keith that a beneficent
God had sent this wonderful creature in an hour that was blackest in
its despair. He was not lying now. He was fighting. He was fighting to
keep for himself the one atom of humanity that meant more to him than
all the rest of the human race, fighting