Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a
look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of
their last parting--that singular moment when they blindly groped for
each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling
handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all
time since--and increasingly during the later years--secret memories of
it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to
fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but
that they had trembled--those two strange hands that had both repelled
and coerced each other--faltering at last into that long moment of
triumphant certainty.

Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew
in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.
Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless
above this present clasp--the yielding, yet opposing, of those
all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual
look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little
awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.

They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic
watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of
this or that esteemed fleshpot.

Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the
returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and
the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during
the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known,
with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in