Upon the threshold she stood, looking in upon him with dark, luminous eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in its mud-stained stocking.
Sir Adrian stared up at her, his brain whirling with a frenzy of joy, gripped in its soaring ecstasy by terror of the incomprehensible.
On the wings of the storm and the wind had she come to him, his love—across the awful barriers that divide life and death? Had his longings and the clamour of his desolate soul reached her, after all these years, in the far-beyond, and was her sweet ghost here to bid him cease from them and let her lie at rest? Or, yet, had she come to call him from the weary world that their souls might meet and be one at last?... Then let her but lay her lips against his, as once in the bitterness of death, that his sorely-tried heart may break with the exquisite pang and he, too, may die upon their kiss.
Swift such thoughts were tossing in the turmoil of his mind when the vision smiled ... a young, rosy, living smile; and then reason, memory, the wonder of her coming, the haunting of her grave went from him; possessed by one single rapturous certainty he started up and gathered the wet form into his strong arms—yet gently as if he feared to crush the vision into void—and showered kisses on the wet face.
Not death—but life! A beating heart beneath his; a lithe young form under his hand, warm lips to his kisses, ... Merciful Heaven! Were, then, these twenty years all an evil, fevered dream, and was he awake at length?
She turned her face from him after a moment and put her hand against his breast to push him from her; and as she did so the wonder in the lovely, familiar eyes turned to merriment, and the lips parted into laughter.
The sound of the girlish laughter broke the spell. Sir Adrian stepped back, and passed his hand across his forehead with a dazed look.
And still she laughed on.
"Why, cousin Landale," she said, at length between the peals; "I came to throw myself upon your kindness for shelter from the storm, but—I had not anticipated such a reception."
The voice, clear and sweet, with just a tinge of outlandish intonation, struck Adrian to the heart.