It was a brilliant object-lesson in the science of attention. Quakes might have riven the earth, and he would have gazed on, through the space of that first electric moment. Jerome trembled violently, felt the cold sweat of terror and unbelief on his forehead. His eyes beheld her—yet how could it be she? His mind seemed suddenly crazed. He had been through too much in one little hour, he reasoned, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she would be gone: there would be only the moonlight on the silent temple, and he would go back to the Star of Troy and take up his life once more.
But the white figure was still before him. And then, like a dart of dazzling inspiration, he knew this was really she, and no creature of disordered fancy. Yet all the while he knelt on her grave and could not move or speak.
She looked quickly about and listened. Jerome caught something intimate and familiar in the tilt of her head. In their old eventless lives she had tilted her head just that way, sometimes. He was rigid while the girl very cautiously crept out on to the steps of the temple and descended to the shrine where the offering had been placed.
Her movements were nervous and stealthy. At the foot of the flight she paused to look about and listen. Then, in an abrupt, snatching way, she seized some of the food and ran back up the steps with it, disappearing into the temple. After a moment she reappeared, and this time moved as though actuated by a slightly less acute nervousness—even lingered a moment to gaze up, in a tense lost way, at the beauty of the night sky. Then she was gone.
It was a time of breathlessness for Jerome, indeed. A time of uncanny, prickling faintness. He trembled. The emotion seemed almost unbearable. Yet he knew she was Stella; and the former romantic appreciation of melancholy triumph was giving way to the chaos foreshadowing readjustment. It was a time of incredulous certainty. A time when fresh sensation seemed to overwhelm all the previous sensations of a lifetime. It was no time for speculation, however; how she came there while he knelt on her grave—what it all meant—must wait. The only concrete issue that really mattered was whether she would emerge again. If not, what should he do? But if she did come out? He could call to her—run and touch her—last frantic doubts—to see if she were real. Still, the fright of it for her.... Well, what then?
A suspicion hackneyed and shiny from human usage clutched at his reason almost comfortingly: “I guess I’ll wake up in a minute!”
She came, carrying a small stone pitcher—came down quickly and crossed the enclosure to the spring beside the tiny gate, where she stopped. Jerome’s mind, laying about feverishly for some piece of subterfuge whereby his presence might be made known without causing her any alarm, yielded nothing but confusion. There must be some way—he ought to be enough of an adventurer and man of the world by this time.... Yet after all he could only stay where he was and call her name—a little more gently and indeed reverently than quite consorted with his new creed of woman-hating.
“Stella!”
Hardly more than a murmur, though it seemed to boom and echo, as a voice will under stress of an unusual silence.
She cried out and fled back to the little flight of steps; but he came forward, an arm outstretched.