the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a
face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that
one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next,
coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.

As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming
forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from
inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman--listening, waiting,
judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the
perfect whole out of many little imperfections.

Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to
a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer
relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered
presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even
his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she
listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far
night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled
together--with such prescience that through all the years her hand was
to feel the groping of his.

Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by
side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the
lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered
her way to womanhood. Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her
dreaming girlhood must be to the present. Should she enter it, she knew
the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the
wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled
rooms.