"Suzette!"
A voice called to her softly from the open window. She looked up, trembling and cold with an awful fear. His voice—Geoffrey's—a spectral voice; the voice of a ghost calling to her, the unbeliever, from the other side of the world—calling in death, or after death, to the woman the living man had loved.
She rose, with a faint scream, and rushed to the window, and was clasped in the living Geoffrey's arms, on the threshold, between the garden and the room. Had she flung herself into his arms in her fear and great surprise? or had he seized her as she ran to him? She could not tell. She knew only that she was sobbing on his breast, clasped in two gaunt arms, which held her as in a grasp of iron.
"Geoffrey, Geoffrey! Alive and well! What delight for your poor mother! Was she not wild with happiness?" she asked, when he released her, after a shower of kisses upon forehead and lips, which she pretended to ignore.
She could not begin quarrelling with him in these first moments of delighted surprise.
He followed her into the room, and she saw his face in the light of the lamp on the piano—worn, wan, haggard, wasted, but with eyes that were full of fire and gladness.
"Suzette, Suzette!" he cried, clasping her hands, and trying to draw her to his heart again, "it was worth a journey over half the world to find you! So sweet, so fair! All that my dreams have shown me, night after night, night after night! Ah, love, we have never been parted. Your image has never left me."
"Africa has done you no good. You are as full of wild nonsense as ever," she said, trying to take the situation lightly, yet trembling with emotion, her heart beating loud and fast, her eyes hardly daring to meet the eyes that dwelt upon her face so fondly. "Tell me about your mother. Was she not surprised—happy?"
"I hope she will be a little glad. I haven't seen her yet."
"Not seen—your mother?"