"You kept away too long, Stefan!"
"I know. But what does it matter?" He spoke half to himself, with his little shrug. "This manifestation or the next—we shall not be apart always."
"No, no!" she cried, catching at his hand. "That is too ethereal, too mystic for me—I can't bear it, Stefan! I want the people I love with me now, in this 'manifestation,' as you call it, where I can talk with them, and touch them, and hold on to them—I am not all spirit. I thought I was, but—I'm not. Oh, my dear, aren't you human at all?"
He did not reply; and Joan, looking at him through swimming tears, saw that it was because he could not.
She dropped his hand. "Forgive me!" she whispered. "I will try to climb up to you—since you will not come down to me.... But you must help me."
"I will help," said Nikolai.
They spoke a little later of Archie, who had been all the while at the back of their thoughts. Both knew it was to him she was returning, rather than to her step-mother.
"You expect too much of him, Joan—you always expect too much of people. Try to take them as you find them. He is one of the many who think better with their hearts than with their heads."
She commented with a faint smile, "My step-mother once told me that there was nothing in the world so dangerous as what she called 'bone-headedness.'"
"Exactly!—especially to the bone-headed—Your Archie is no fool, however. There are perhaps fewer convolutions in his gray matter than in ours, that is all. He has made mistakes with his head, and will again. But with his heart—never."