Her words grew vaguer and vaguer as she returned slowly to her normal waking state, and now she stopped altogether, as though suddenly aware that she had been surprised into telling secrets.  But all the way back, as we carried her carefully through the trees, the girl smiled and murmured Sangree’s name and asked if he was injured, until it finally became clear to me that the wild soul of the one had called to the wild soul of the other and in the secret depths of their beings the call had been heard and understood.  John Silence was right.  In the abyss of her heart, too deep at first for recognition, the girl loved him, and had loved him from the very beginning.  Once her normal waking consciousness recognised the fact they would leap together like twin flames, and his affliction would be at an end; his intense desire would be satisfied; he would be cured.

And in Sangree’s tent Dr. Silence and I sat up for the remainder of the night—­this wonderful and haunted night that had shown us such strange glimpses of a new heaven and a new hell—­for the Canadian tossed upon his balsam boughs with high fever in his blood, and upon each cheek a dark and curious contusion showed, throbbing with severe pain although the skin was not broken and there was no outward and visible sign of blood.

“Maloney shot straight, you see,” whispered Dr. Silence to me after the clergyman had gone to his tent, and had put Joan to sleep beside her mother, who, by the way, had never once awakened.  “The bullet must have passed clean through the face, for both cheeks are stained.  He’ll wear these marks all his life—­smaller, but always there.  They’re the most curious scars in the world, these scars transferred by repercussion from an injured Double.  They’ll remain visible until just before his death, and then with the withdrawal of the subtle body they will disappear finally.”

His words mingled in my dazed mind with the sighs of the troubled sleeper and the crying of the wind about the tent.  Nothing seemed to paralyse my powers of realisation so much as these twin stains of mysterious significance upon the face before me.

It was odd, too, how speedily and easily the Camp resigned itself again to sleep and quietness, as though a stage curtain had suddenly dropped down upon the action and concealed it; and nothing contributed so vividly to the feeling that I had been a spectator of some kind of visionary drama as the dramatic nature of the change in the girl’s attitude.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the change had not been so sudden and revolutionary as appeared.  Underneath, in those remoter regions of consciousness where the emotions, unknown to their owners, do secretly mature, and owe thence their abrupt revelation to some abrupt psychological climax, there can be no doubt that Joan’s love for the Canadian had been growing steadily and irresistibly all the time.  It had now rushed to the surface so that she recognised it; that was all.