The fire of battle was still in his eyes, but it faded when they fell upon the pale girl. A great pity and tenderness filled him. She swayed to his arms, and her head dropped on his shoulder. He picked her up like a child, and followed the servants to the sea-stair.
But first he found Vlastos' whistle, and blew it shrilly. The answer was a furious hammering at the castle door.
Far out at sea, in the small hours, the yacht sped eastward with a favouring wind. Behind in the vault of night at a great distance shone a point of brightness, which flickered and fell as if from some mighty fire.
The two sat in the stern in that first rapture of comradeship which has no words to fit it. Her head lay in the crook of his arm, and she sighed happily, like one awakened to a summer's dawn from a night of ill dreams. At last he spoke.
"Do you know that I have been looking for you for twenty years?"
She nestled closer to him.
"And I," she said, "have been waiting on you from the beginning of the world."