He put aside her thanks with a gesture. "You saved me also. You found me ill and suffering and your horse carried me to my cabin."
"I want to tell you," she went on hastily, her fingers lacing, "that I do not judge you as others do. I know about your past life—what you have forgotten. I know you have put it all behind you."
His face changed swiftly. To-day the determination with which he had striven to put from his mind the problem of his clouded past had broken down. In the light of the charge which had been flung in his teeth the afternoon before, his imagination had dwelt intolerably on it. "Better to have ended it all under the wheels of the freight-engine," he had told himself. "What profit to have another character, if the old lies chuckling in the shadow, an old-man-of-the-sea, a lurking thing, like a personal devil, to pull me down!" In these gloomy reflections her features had recurred with a painful persistence. He had had a bad half-hour on the mountain, and now, before her look and tone, the ever-torturing query burst its bonds.
"You know!" he said hoarsely. "Yet you say that? They stoned me in the street the day I came back. Yesterday they counted me a thief. It is like a hideous nightmare that I can't wake from. Who am I? Where did I come from? I dare not ask, for fear of further shame! Can you imagine what that means?"
He broke off, leaning an unsteady hand against a tree. "I've no excuse for this raving!" he said, in a moment, his face turned away. "I have seen you but twice. I do not even know your name. I am a man snatched out of the limbo and dropped into hell, to watch the bright spirits passing on the other side of the gulf!"
Pain lay very deep in the words, and it pierced her like a bodily pang, so close did she seem to him in spirit. She felt in it unrest, rebellion, the shrinking sensibility that had writhed in loneliness, and the longing for new foothold on the submerged causeway of life.
She came close to him and touched his arm.
"I know all that you suffer," she said. "You are doing the strong thing, the brave thing! The man in you is not astray now; it was lost, but it has found its way back. When your memory comes, you will see that it is fate that has been leading you. There was nothing in your past that can not be buried and forgotten. What you have been you will never be again. I know that! I saw you fight Devlin and I know why you did it. I heard you play the violin! Whatever has been, I have faith in you now!"
She spoke breathlessly, in very abandon, carried away by her feeling. As she spoke he had turned toward her, his paleness flushed, his eyes leaping up like hungry fires, devouring her face. At the look timidity rushed upon her. She stopped abruptly and took a startled step from him.
He turned from her instantly, his hands dropped at his sides. The word that had almost sprung to speech had slipped back into the void.