He came forward quickly and took her hand and looked down into her face.  She regarded him tremulously, instinctively guessing the vital importance of this moment for him; and she knew then that he had been looking forward to it in mingled hope and dread, as one who gazes seaward after a night of tempest for the ship he has seen at dusk in the offing.  What had the tempest done to her?  Such was his question.  And her heart leaped as she saw the light growing in his eyes, for it meant much to her that he should see that she was not utterly dismantled.  She fell; his own hand tremble as he relinquished hers.  He was greatly moved; his voice, too, betrayed it.

“You see I have found you,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered; “—­why did you come?”

“Why have I always come to you, when it was possible?” he asked.

“No one ever had such a friend, Peter.  Of that I am sure:’ 

“I wanted to see Paris,” he said, “before I grew too decrepit to enjoy it.”

She smiled, and turned away.

“Have you seen much of it?”

“Enough to wish to see more.”

“When did you arrive?”

“Some time in the night,” he said, “from Cherbourg.  And I’m staying at a very grand hotel, which might be anywhere.  A man I crossed with on the steamer took me there.  I think I’d move to one of the quieter ones, the French ones, if I were a little surer of my pronunciation and the subjunctive mood.”

“You don’t mean to say you’ve been studying French!”

He coloured a little, and laughed.

“You think it ridiculous at my time of life?  I suppose you’re right.  You should have seen me trying to understand the cabmen.  The way these people talk reminds me more of a Gatling gun than anything I can think of.  It certainly isn’t human.”

“Perhaps you have come over as ambassador,” she suggested.  “When I saw you in the cab, even before I recognized you, I thought of a bit of our soil broken off and drifted over here.”

Her voice did not quite sustain the lighter note—­the emotion his visit was causing her was too great.  He brought with him into her retreat not so much a flood of memories as of sensations.  He was a man whose image time with difficulty obliterates, whose presence was a shining thing:  so she had grown to value it in proportion as she had had less of it.  She did inevitably recall the last time she had seen him, in the little Western city, and how he had overwhelmed her, invaded her with doubts and aroused the spirit which had possessed her to fight fiercely for its foothold.  And to-day his coming might be likened to the entrance of a great physician into the room of a distant and lonely patient whom amidst wide ministrations he has not forgotten.  She saw now that he had been right.  She had always seen it, clearly indeed when he had been beside her, but the spirit within her had been too strong, until now.  Now, when it had plundered her soul of treasures—­once so little valued—­it had fled.  Such were her thoughts.