“Pain,” he said, unconscious that he spoke.  At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—­and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the pommel of his saddle.

“Are you ill?” she asked; “shall we dismount?  If you feel dizzy, please lean against me.”

“I am all right,” he said coolly; and as she recovered her seat he set his horse in motion.  His face had become very red now; he looked at her, then beyond her, with all the deliberate concentration of aloof indifference.

Confused, conscious that something had happened which she did not comprehend, and sensitively aware of the preoccupation which, if it did not ignore her, accepted her presence as of no consequence, she permitted her horse to set his own pace.

Neither self-command nor self-control was lacking now in Selwyn; he simply was too self-absorbed to care what she thought—­whether she thought at all.  And into his consciousness, throbbing heavily under the rushing reaction from shock, crowded the crude fact that Alixe was no longer an apparition evoked in sleeplessness, in sun-lit brooding; in the solitude of crowded avenues and swarming streets; she was an actual presence again in his life—­she was here, bodily, unchanged—­unchanged!—­for he had conceived a strange idea that she must have changed physically, that her appearance had altered.  He knew it was a grotesquely senseless idea, but it clung to him, and he had nursed it unconsciously.

He had, truly enough, expected to encounter her in life again—­somewhere; though what he had been preparing to see, Heaven alone knew; but certainly not the supple, laughing girl he had known—­that smooth, slender, dark-eyed, dainty visitor who had played at marriage with him through a troubled and unreal dream; and was gone when he awoke—­so swift the brief two years had passed, as swift in sorrow as in happiness.

Two vision-tinted years!—­ended as an hour ends with the muffled chimes of a clock, leaving the air of an empty room vibrant.  Two years!—­a swift, restless dream aglow with exotic colour, echoing with laughter and bugle-call and the noise of the surf on Samar rocks—­a dream through which stirred the rustle of strange brocades and the whisper of breezes blowing over the grasses of Leyte; and the light, dry report of rifles, and the shuffle of bare feet in darkened bungalows, and the whisper of dawn in Manila town.

Two years!—­wherever they came from, wherever they had gone.  And now, out of the ghostly, shadowy memory, behold her stepping into the world again!—­living, breathing, quickening with the fire of life undimmed in her.  And he had seen the bright colour spreading to her eyes, and the dark eyes widen to his stare; he had seen the vivid blush, the forced smile, the nod, the voiceless parting of her stiffened lips.  Then she was gone, leaving the whole world peopled with her living presence and the very sky ringing with the words her lips had never uttered, never would utter while sun and moon and stars endured.