Yet there was one hope. Perhaps he was even more changed than he had supposed, and if he went away instantly without speaking, she might not recognize him. He stepped back, on the impulse, but she held out her hands, as he turned to go, and cried to him piteously.
“Oh, if you are a dream,” she said, in a low, strange voice, “stay! I beg of you to stay.”
Still he did not speak. He could not, now. He waited.
“It’s all a dream,” she whispered. “I know that. Coming here—to the empty house—finding my own picture—and then—then—when I looked for John Sanbourne, seeing you—my love! O God, let me never wake up in this world. If this could only be—what they call death!”
The word broke, to a sob, and she swayed towards him, deathly white. Denin sprang forward, and caught her in his arms—his wife—the first time he had ever held her so. Then, because he could think no longer, but only feel, he kissed her on hair and eyes and lips, and strained her to him with every worshiping name he had given her in his heart since their wedding and parting day.
She lay so still against him, that it seemed she must have fainted; but her eyes opened, drowned in his, as he kissed her on the lips. He saw the blue glitter, as if two sapphires blocked his vision, and suddenly his face was wet with Barbara’s tears. “Have I died?” she whispered. And the tears which were damp on his face were salt on his lips as he whispered back, “No.”
He remembered how he, too, had once thought himself dead, and then had crept slowly back to life. He had seen Barbara then, as in a dream within a dream. Now she, too, was passing through this experience. He held her tight. He could not let her suffer as he had suffered when he came back to life! Yet what could he do for her, after all? The sense of his helplessness was heavy upon him.
“Forgive me,” he said, “Barbara, darling! I never meant this to happen. The first I heard of you—after—was that you’d married—your cousin. I believed you loved him. I was in a German hospital—broken to pieces—disfigured. I ought to have died, but somehow I couldn’t die. I had to live on. Later, I escaped. I came here—where you had lived. God knows, all through I tried to do for the best—your best. Nothing else mattered. I wrote that book—for you, only for you! And you know the rest. You turned my hell to heaven. I was—almost happy, except for what you suffered. But I dared not have you come here. I cabled. I was going away—”
She pressed her head back against his shoulder, and looked up at him. “You were going—” The words burst from her on a high note of sharp reproach, but she caught them back with a sigh of joy. “You didn’t go!” she breathed. “God wouldn’t have let you go. He put it in my heart to leave England the day after I wrote. Ah, we’re not dreaming, and we’re not dead! We’re alive, and we love each other better than all the world. I know now that you do love me, or you couldn’t hold me and kiss me so. You couldn’t have made such a sacrifice—the sacrifice of your very life and self for me. It was like you—like you! The mistake was my fault, not yours. But I’ll make up to you for it all, and you will make up to me. We’ll never part for an hour again.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Barbara,” he reminded her. “John Denin’s dead. We can’t bring him back to life. Too many interests are involved, yours first of all, but others, too. It would be selfish and cruel for me to take you so—”