“Did you think me a spook?” he laughed unsteadily. “It does seem almost impossible. I’ve fairly come back from the dead! Did you get my letter? I wrote you from London.”
“No—no, I’ve had no letter. I could scarcely believe that you had come back!”
She was trembling; she saw the look in his eyes and knew that he loved her. And how wasted he was, how pale! Here was a man who had indeed been near to death. She fought for time.
“I had given up all hope long ago,” she faltered. “The others were rescued; they believed you had been lost.”
As she spoke, she again raised her eyes to his, trying to find some reassurance there, something that would refute the horrible fear that wrung her heart; but what she saw made her look down, and a deep flush mounted slowly and painfully over her pale face.
“I was as nearly dead as a man could be and live,” he answered soberly. “I can feel the frozen horror of it now, the creeping drowsiness—can see that bleak, inexorable wilderness where I was deserted and left to die!”
He paused, as if the mere thought of it made utterance impossible, as if he had faced a crisis so terrible and so deathlike that it must remain forever inarticulate.
“Left to die!” she repeated in a broken voice, feeling that the very earth sank beneath her feet. “Deserted! What can you mean?”
She was trying to be calm, but a nervous chill shook her from head to foot. He saw it; he caught her hands in his again.
“Diane, you care!” he breathed with deep emotion. “What does anything matter, then. I’ve come back and I’ve found you, my love, my love!”