She shook a little. Something especially cold and piercing struck to her heart. She raised her eyes quickly, and there, close beside her on the bridge, the dead man stood.
His bright dark eyes looked straight into hers.
"Don't you know who I am?" he said.
She would have fallen but for his quick grasp, and the grasp choked the cry that was rising, for it was the grasp of flesh and of strength.
"Don't you know who I am?" he asked again. "I thought that I saw in your eyes that you knew. I thought that she had described me to you. I'm Lisle Bayard. You wrote to me, you know."
She drew away from him, and leaned heavily against the bridge-rail. If it were true that this were he! A new body to serve a great purpose. If that Mystery that is the rooting of all that is or is to be had been building this man and this hour, and weaving and twisting and shaping both to its ends! She seemed to stand motionless, but within herself she was dizzy and reeling. "He moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform."
"You have freed them?" she said, divining truth with a prescience that startled herself.
"Oh, yes," he said, "I have been to Geneseo. They are free. But you never really believed that I had any interest in them, did you?"
His voice was no strange voice in her ears, nor was his manner that of a stranger. She had to press her temples hard with her two hands. "You are like the man whom I loved," she said; "he—he died yesterday. That was what drew me to her; she described you and said that you loved her."
"Poor thing," he said, simply.