It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for, and I said so.
She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old circuit is broken, and can't be restored—not yet!"
We tried again hard; but it was useless.
She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes from grave to gay—all that made everything she said so suggestive of all she wanted to say besides.
"Gogo, I knew you would come. I wished it! How dreadfully you have suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not be any more; we are going to change all that.
"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back, even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.
"Nobody has ever come back before.
"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.
"I have come a long way—such a long way—to have an abboccamento with you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I could, I couldn't make you understand. But you will know some day, and there is no hurry whatever.
"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; your share of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of that again—you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"