She made a gesture of assent. As the first rings of bluish vapor mounted into the air, Daymond found her watching him with those intent, expectant eyes.
Feeling himself bound to make some observation, he said: “It is very wonderful to me to see you here! It was very good of you to come!�
She returned: “They had to let me come, I think! I begged so—I prayed so, that at last——� She paused. Daymond was not listening. He was looking at her steadfastly and pondering....
It had been his whim, in the first poignancy of bereavement, to destroy all portraits of her, so that with the lapse of years no faulty touch should bewray the memory of her vanished beauty. It struck him now for the first time that his brush had played the courtier, and flattered her, for the most part, unblushingly. He found himself criticizing unfavorably the turn of her throat and the swell of her bosom, and the dark voluptuous languishment of her look. The faint perfume of heliotrope that was shaken forth now, as of old time, from her hair and her garments no longer intoxicated, but sickened him. This, then, was the woman he had mourned for fifteen years! He began to feel that he had murmured unwisely at the dispensation of Providence. He began to revolt at this recrudescence of an outworn passion—to realize that at twenty-five he had taken a commonplace woman for a divinity—a woman whom, if she had not died when she did, he would have wearied of—ended perhaps in hating. He found himself in danger of hating her now.
“At last they let me come. They said I should repent it—as if I could!� Her eyes rested on him lingeringly; her hand stilled the eager trembling of her lips. “Never! Of course, you seemed a little strange at first. You are not quite—not quite yourself now; it is natural—after fifteen years. And presently, when I tell you—— Oh! what will you say when I tell you all?�
She left her chair and came toward him, so swiftly that he had not time to avoid her. She laid her hand on his shoulder and bent her mouth to his ear. One of her peculiarities had been that her lips were always cold, even when her passion burned most fiercely. The nearness of those lips, once so maddeningly desirable and sweet, made Daymond’s flesh creep horribly. He breathed with difficulty, and the great drops of agony stood thickly on his forehead—not with weak, superstitious terror of the ghost; with unutterable loathing of the woman.
“Listen!� she said. “They are wise in the place I came from; they know things that are not known here.... You have heard it said that once in the life of every human being living upon earth comes a time when the utterance of a wish will be followed by its fulfilment. The poor might be made rich, the sick well, the sad merry, the loveless beloved—in one moment—if they could only know when that moment comes! But not once in a million million lifetimes do they hit upon it; and so they live penniless and in pain, and sorrowful and lonely, all their lives. I let my chance go by, like many others, long before I died; but yours is yet to come.� Her voice thrilled with a note of wild triumph; the clasp of her arm tightened on his neck. “Oh, love!� she cried; “the wonderful moment is close at hand! It is midnight now�—she pointed to the great north window, through which the frosty silver face of the moon was staring in relief against a framed-in square of velvet blackness, studded with twinkling star-points—“but with the first signs of the dawn that you and I have greeted together, heart of my heart!—how many times in the days that may come again!—with the graying of the East and the paling of the stars comes the Opportunity for you. Now, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?�
He understood and quailed before her. But she was blindly confident in his truth, stupidly reliant on his constancy.
“When it comes, beloved, you shall take me in your arms—breathe your wish upon these lips of mine, in a kiss. Say, while God’s ear is open, ‘Father, give her back to me, living and loving, as of old!’ and I shall be given—I shall be given!�
She threw both arms about him and leaned to him, and sobbed and laughed with the rapture of her revelation and the anticipation of the joy that was to come.