“So you had the idea of this—?”

“Of what?” she asked in a moment.

“Well—­of what has happened.”

“I believed at least you’d have been here.  I’ve known, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”

“‘Known’ it—?”

“Well, I’ve believed it.  I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago—­but I felt sure.  I knew you would,” she declared.

“That I’d persist, you mean?”

“That you’d see him.”

“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail.  “There’s somebody—­an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay.  But it’s not me.”

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes.  “No—­it’s not you.”  And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile.  “No, thank heaven,” she repeated, “it’s not you!  Of course it wasn’t to have been.”

“Ah but it was,” he gently insisted.  And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks.  “I was to have known myself.”

“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly.  And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, “But it wasn’t only that, that you hadn’t been at home,” she went on.  “I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps.  After a little, if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up.  But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intentions—­“it wasn’t only that.”

His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her.  “What more then?”

She met it, the wonder she had stirred.  “In the cold dim dawn, you say?  Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.”

“Saw me—?”

“Saw him,” said Alice Staverton.  “It must have been at the same moment.”

He lay an instant taking it in—­as if he wished to be quite reasonable.  “At the same moment?”

“Yes—­in my dream again, the same one I’ve named to you.  He came back to me.  Then I knew it for a sign.  He had come to you.”

At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better.  She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. “He didn’t come to me.”

“You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled.

“Ah I’ve come to myself now—­thanks to you, dearest.  But this brute, with his awful face—­this brute’s a black stranger.  He’s none of me, even as I might have been,” Brydon sturdily declared.

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility.  “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”