A wild throb shot through Julie’s pulses. There above the crowd was again the Excelsior face—that fantastic name she had given it, oh, so long ago! The tawny head was watchfully alert, as if it were used to scanning great distances. The face, glowing and vital, had a desert tan, and in it was a hint of the desert’s awesome solitudes. His light, vigorous frame seemed to have been built for heroic purposes. It struck Julie that here was the real Atlas to hold the New World on his unbending shoulders.
Julie watched him breathlessly. People stopped him everywhere to talk. Still he was advancing in her direction. Her heart pumped so that the blood seemed to be escaping all over her body. When he was quite near, his eyes turned in her direction. He stared hard, and an abrupt change came over his face.
“It can’t be you!” he said before her, as if he expected her to contradict him. Then he added: “Some time, of course, I knew you would come back! But it’s been such a long time. Something seemed to swallow you up after that night—on the roof, you remember.”
She did remember, and it was plain that he remembered too, just as if many sorry months had not intervened. Very few people were like that—capable of taking up, as if it had just been dropped, the mood of the past. And they were back in it easily at once. It was only by an extreme chance that she was here at all. In these improbable times, where life shifted as upon a screen from day to day, any expectations were preposterous. Yet he accepted her reappearance as something that was bound to come about in chance. His certainty that they would meet again seemed strange at first, and then the strangeness vanished.
“I was called out of the room—to the cholera situation in Leyte, wasn’t it?” he went on, looking intently at her. “I thought I’d be back at once—that’s the way over here. But when I did return, you had disappeared completely—not a clew to you left.”
Julie smiled grimly. “The East misled me for a while. Now that it has found me again, I wonder—”
“It was thought that you had gone back to the States—but I knew somehow that you had not. How did you happen to go so far away?”
“It was you who sent me, that night. You breathed the fire into me that started me going. But I couldn’t show you, or God, or anybody a thing that I have done!”
His far-seeking, gold-colored eyes flamed through her. “That’s the idea that stalks us all. And we can’t live an age or two to find out what all this fine fever of our actions will boil down to. We can only go on believing that our particular fire is unquenchable. I have my misgivings, too. There are shadows lifting on the horizon at this moment that may portend untold calamity. But I am perfectly positive that victory—far along the road, perhaps—is ahead.
“As for my sending you away,” he exclaimed swiftly, “one does not, for all the causes that animate the earth, send persons like you away. How could I—a being all star-dust and light?” He looked in admiration upon her shining youth.