She shivered. “Don’t you know me?” He sat up and looked at her, and wondered if he must doubt his own senses next. No, the flush on the dark cheek, the soft brown orbs and wealth of black hair, were all beauties possessed by his tormenting friend, Mrs. Mancredo. Like a summer night-lightning memory flashed, sending him to search her face to find in it—the link lost in his twice-dissevered life.
“Of course I know you,” he said angrily; “and as I don’t seem to be dying, I’ll stand on my feet.” And he gave her his hand, helping her to rise, with his wits all about him.
Something in his act and look whelmed the soul of this strange woman who had been his playmate from childhood up, and had parted from him on the bridal hour. And sinking on the arbor-seat she wept violently. With a scowl of distress and of another emotion, in which there was no liking, tortured by the mental hiatus which the sight of Mrs. Mancredo intensified, he said suddenly: “Why do you tell such falsehoods? I hate it in woman.”
Astonished, and giggling nervously at his queer starts and turns, her eyes shining like lambent stars through the mist, chiefly concerned not to startle him, and falling back into the way which, as “little Alitza,” she had had to use toward him for the last five years, she gently said:
“Well, Regie, I never will again.”
“Oh, oh, they speak like that where I just came from!” he cried. “Tell me, oh, tell me, was it a trance? I cannot endure this cloud over my mind which is so thin that I can almost see through it, and yet so dense that it stifles me. Tell me all!” he pleaded.
“I will. Stop me if I skip anything that you want explained. You have been for quite a while with the Dakshas. I have been here, too. You have lived a double existence; and though I could see you every day, you seemed never to see Mrs. Mancredo, but instead, your thoughts were away in some other world and time. You thought Ethel Daksha was your mother, and always called her so. And once I dreamed, or I saw you, with your real mother and Ethel Daksha together in the unseen world, and—”
“Yes, yes, angels and my mother’s touch—and—Laura and Petrarch, and sustained ecstasies she brought in on my soul, flooding my very brain with joys, warm, white, flying joys—which—oh, it is gone, I am lost again. No, no, I have it. There was great whiteness, great light, Alpine heights and woman there, in the grace and glory of electric might, competent to make man mount as on wings, as eagle’s wings ascending heights, else inaccessible! I was a boy, always playing with joys, sweeter than wine and more freely fine. No one blamed another there, and no one hurried. And I saw always Alitza there; and nothing had harmed her, for her angels had guarded her at every step. Oh, take me back! No, no, I will not go back! You think I rave; I do not, I only remember too much at once. I must remember that Daniel just said—you heard it yourself—that a man so expensively educated by angels of earth and heaven must be honorable and soldierly, and gather himself to do for others what has been done for his redemption to good use on earth. Come, oh, once more try and bring me what I lack!”
“You know, Reginald, after we all had last night a strange, a heavenly strange evening, you suddenly roused out of your long, long inattention to what was going on about you. And now you seem to have forgotten everything since the night five years ago when you quarrelled (are you listening?) with Mrs. Mancredo on the stairs of the hotel, when—”
“Oh where, where is little Alitza—playmate, sister, and—she, you—it is strange you are both such liars!”