XXV
No responsive elation lightened the dark regard that shifted from Lanyard's face to Mallison's and back again, only a smile pitiful and chiding dawned. "So this," Eve slowly said, and slowly shook her head at the man who loved her, "is why you ran away!"
That look he could no more interpret than he could the riddle of her words; both he requited with a muddled stare. "I?" he blankly wondered—"ran away—?"
She nodded once. "But you didn't know, I'm sure, what you were doing then; it's natural you should not remember. You are yourself tonight—you were not, then."
"Yes," he cried—"thank God! tonight I am myself . . ."
One of her hands went out to this, he caught it between his own, was drawn by it to her bosom. Common impulse moved them aside and away from the man they had forgotten, the man who lay sobbing and fighting for breath on the floor beyond the desk.
"So you come back to me!" It was as if in the gaze that plunged into her eyes his very soul passed out from him to lose itself, and all awareness of the world without themselves as well, in that treasury of love illimitable and incalculable which those eyes disclosed. "So, as I knew you would, you come back to me at last, your honour cleansed! Michael," the woman breathed, yearning to him—"my Michael!"
"What are you telling me? I ran away from you—!"
"Three months after you were injured in that motor accident, while your memory still was uncertain, when often you couldn't recall one day's events on the next . . . without a word of explanation or farewell, one day you left me, disappeared . . ."