She was lying on some sort of lounge—a leather lounge. She lifted her lids very, very slowly. She was in the smoking-compartment of a train—alone! Where was he? She tried wildly to sit up—to call out—
And then something moved beside her on the edge of the couch. It was a head, a bowed, curly head which she recognized and which belonged to a figure that knelt beside her in an attitude of utter despair.
"Oh, Archie, Archie!" she whimpered. "Then you aren't killed!"
The head jerked up. The next instant she was in his arms, her face against his. She was being kissed and kissed again—eyes, lips, cheeks, hair—whatever he could reach. She could not stop him. She did not try to stop him. Indeed there was something consoling, comforting in those frantic kisses, all wet with tears, and fiercely tender with the passion of one who has brought his treasure single-handed out of the jaws of death.
"My God! My God! My God!" said Archibald; and nothing else.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Two days later he came to see her, with a good deal of court-plaster about his face, and limping on a sprained ankle; and found Joan in bed with a wrenched shoulder, otherwise unhurt. Effie May convoyed him amiably upstairs and left him there, to his intense perturbation. He stood sheepishly beside the door, hardly daring to look at the pale, laughing face among the pillows—that face with which he had taken such amazing liberties.
Joan in a peignoir, with her hair in a great braid on either shoulder, looked more like the little girl he had first seen weeping alone on the train, than the composed young lady of ballrooms and horse shows. Yet his awe of her was not lessened. On the contrary. Once before, when she lay thus helpless before him, he had forgotten himself. Suppose his emotions were to form the habit of running away with him? He clenched his hands hard.
This timidity on his part did much to restore her own shattered composure. She had been rather dreading this interview to which she had steeled herself. Better to get it over and done with, however, since the thing was inevitable. She could not quite ignore what had passed.