He set his lips tightly, and nodded, but did not speak.
"I waited a long time," she repeated, as a child appealing for understanding. "Did they tell you I thought you were dead?"
“Then I Heard Your Voice”
He nodded assent. No one had told him so, but the words explained much.
"You said you would come back if you lived, and you never came, and they told me—the padre told me—that you were dead!"
"So I am," he said, gently; "and they told me, my lady of the spirit, that you had taken the final vow of the convent—that the night, our one night, was a thing you were forgetting under a black veil. Child, child! they lied to us, and now—"
"Forgetting?" she said, slowly. "How does one forget a night like that, when we walked out of the wilderness into the day together? You never came back; and I—I wanted to be in the world where you had been, so I—"
"I know," he whispered, gently; "I know, my doña of the spirit."
He had not meant to touch her,—only to look at her and speak to her once, and then ride wherever fate might take him.