She looked up.
“Hélène Courvoisier,” she replied, unhesitatingly.
SHE WHO CAME BACK
The clock upon the mantelpiece struck, discreetly, the hour of eleven in the night-stillness of the study where old Henry Arkwright worked. He glanced up with busy, preoccupied brows to the dial, confirming his half-registered impression of the tale of strokes. Eleven o’clock! He would work for another two or three hours yet. He sucked cheerfully at his pipe as he signed the just-written counsel’s opinion; folded the stiff, long documents and tied them neatly with their original tape; took yet another legal case from the pile in front of him. He felt himself in form to-night, enjoyed the efficiency of his brain that worked so swiftly and surely in this solitude. The complete silence of the house was subtly grateful to him. He was immune from all disturbance. The servants had long since gone to bed. His concentration upon his task was unthreatened, the stores of legal knowledge held ready for his use in that practised brain of his unobscured by any concrete trivialities. Eleven o’clock—yes, he could put in another three hours good work before, exhausted to-night like all the other nights, he went slowly up the empty stairs to his empty bedroom. He adjusted himself to consideration of the affidavits he unfolded.
What was that? The faint ringing of the door-bell, far away in the servants’ quarters but distinctly audible in this sleep-hushed house, persisted until it came to his full recognition. He looked up, puzzled, from the papers in the shaded light of his reading-lamp, glanced around the book-lined study where the fire-glow flickered redly in the absence of full illumination. Who could it be at this time of night? The far-away faint ringing continued, eloquent of an unrelaxed pressure upon the bell-push at the porch. He listened to it with exasperated annoyance, resentful of this interruption of his labours, trying to imagine an identity for this inconsiderately late visitor. Whoever it was, he himself would have to open the door. The servants were long ago asleep. They would not hear the bell. With a petulant exclamation, he rose from his desk, went out into the darkened hall.
Stimulated into haste in instinctive response to the determined urgency of the summons of that bell, its sound quite loud and definite out here, he fumbled hurriedly for the electric switch. Then, the lights full on, he went quickly to the door and opened it. A cold wind blew in upon him from the darkness into which he peered, seeing, at first, nothing. The ringing had ceased. A doubt of reality, a suspicion of hallucination, shot through him, was dispelled upon the instant. From the shadowed side of the porch a woman’s form moved into the broad beam of light. A curious, inexplicable, sudden consciousness of his own heart, vaguely not normal in its action, filled his breast as he stared out to her in a momentary suspense of recognition. Then she turned her face full upon him.
He started back, shocked to his inmost as though he had touched a live electric wire.
“Christine!” he gasped, in incredulous amazement. “Christine!—You!—Come back?”