It seemed incredible that he should be hearing her voice, the same voice, unexcited, sweet, and thrilling, speaking as if she had seen him yesterday and with a certain reserved gladness was welcoming him again today.  It was impossible for him to realize in these moments the immeasurable distance that lay between their viewpoints.  He was simply Alan Holt—­she was the dead risen to life.  Many times in his grief he had visualized what he would do if some miracle could bring her back to him like this; he had thought of taking her in his arms and never letting her go.  But now that the miracle had come to pass, and she was within his reach, he stood without moving, trying only to speak.

“You—­Mary Standish!” he said at last.  “I thought—­”

He did not finish.  It was not himself speaking.  It was another individual within him, a detached individual trying to explain his lack of physical expression.  He wanted to cry out his gladness, to shout with joy, yet the directing soul of action in him was stricken.  She touched his arm hesitatingly.

“I didn’t think you would care,” she said.  “I thought you wouldn’t mind—­if I came up here.”

Care!  The word was like an explosion setting things loose in his brain, and the touch of her hand sent a sweep of fire through him.  He heard himself cry out, a strange, unhuman sort of cry, as he swept her to his breast.  He held her close, crushing kisses upon her mouth, his fingers buried in her hair, her slender body almost broken in his arms.  She was alive—­she had come back to him—­and he forgot everything in these blind moments but that great truth which was sweeping over him in a glorious inundation.  Then, suddenly, he found that she was fighting him, struggling to free herself and putting her hands against his face in her efforts.  She was so close that he seemed to see nothing but her eyes, and in them he did not see what he had dreamed of finding—­but horror.  It was a stab that went into his heart, and his arms relaxed.  She staggered back, trembling and swaying a little as she got her breath, her face very white.

He had hurt her.  The hurt was in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, as if he had become a menace from which she would run if he had not taken the strength from her.  As she stood there, her parted lips showing the red of his kisses, her shining hair almost undone, he held out his hands mutely.

“You think—­I came here for that?” she panted.

“No,” he said.  “Forgive me.  I am sorry.”

It was not anger that he saw in her face.  It was, instead, a mingling of shock and physical hurt; a measurement of him now, as she looked at him, which recalled her to him as she had stood that night with her back against his cabin door.  Yet he was not trying to piece things together.  Even subconsciously that was impossible, for all life in him was centered in the one stupendous thought that she was not dead,