A step fell behind him. He turned half-dazed, his mind full of conflict. A girl stood near him, delicate and alert and wand-like as a golden willow, her curling amber hair loosely caught, her sea-blue eyes wide and a little startled. She wore a Venetian hood, out of whose green sheath her face looked, like lilies under leaves.
Gordon’s mind came back to the present of time and space across an illimitable distance.
He stared, half believing himself in some automatic hallucination. There had been no time to speculate upon what manner of hand had written those words, what manner of woman’s soul had so weirdly touched his own out of the void. Knowledge came staggeringly. Hers was the face of the miniature that his heel had crushed to powder.
He noted that her eyes had fallen to the book in his hand, as mechanically he asked, in Italian:
“This book is yours, Signorina?”
“Yes.” There was a faint flush of color in her cheek, for she saw the volume was open at the written page.
Gordon was looking at her palely, seeing her face set in a silver oval. Eyes, hair and lips; there in lifeless pigments, here in flesh and blood! The same yet more, for here were unnunned youth, slumbrous, glorious womanhood unawaked, stirring rosily in every vein, giving a passionate human tint to the spiritual impression. And underneath all, the same unsullied something he had raged at that black night, even while her prayer for him lay here dumb at the feet of Our Lady of Sorrows!
His voice sounded unreal to his own ears as he spoke, his mind feeling its way through tumbled predispositions to an unfamiliar goal. “If apology be owed,” he said, “for reading what was intended for purer eyes than this world’s, I most humbly offer it, Signorina! I did so quite inadvertently.”
He held out the book as he spoke, and her fingers closed over it, the gesture betraying confusion. Who was this stranger, with face of such wan luster and gray-blue eyes so sadly brilliant? Some sense in her discerned a deeper, unguessed suffering that made her heart throb painfully.
“If there be an ear which is open to human appeal,” he added gently, “that prayer was registered, I know!”