propped and pillowed.  He took it all in, and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice:  he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink.  It was the two women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon’s having plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key—­and on her having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered near the house.  She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle—­her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman’s visit; but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there, and they had entered together.  He had then lain, beyond the vestibule, very much as he was lying now—­quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in a depth of stupor.  What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.

“It must have been that I was.”  He made it out as she held him.  “Yes—­I can only have died.  You brought me literally to life.  Only,” he wondered, his eyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?”

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything.

“And now I keep you,” she said.

“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face still hung over him:  in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close.  It was the seal of their situation—­of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence.  But he came back.  “Yet how did you know—?”

“I was uneasy.  You were to have come, you remember—­and you had sent no word.”

“Yes, I remember—­I was to have gone to you at one to-day.”  It caught on to their “old” life and relation—­which were so near and so far.  “I was still out there in my strange darkness—­where was it, what was it?  I must have stayed there so long.”  He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.

“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.

“Since this morning—­it must have been:  the cold dim dawn of to-day.  Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “where have I been?” He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan.  “What a long dark day!”

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment.  “In the cold dim dawn?” she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy.  “As I didn’t turn up you came straight—?”

She barely cast about.  “I went first to your hotel—­where they told me of your absence.  You had dined out last evening and hadn’t been back since.  But they appeared to know you had been at your club.”