“It’s good,” she said gravely. “It’s power, and so it’s danger. But it’s good.... Are we friends, Ban?”
“How can we be!”
“How can we not be! You’ve tried to drop me out of your life. Oh, I know, because I know you—better than you think. You’ll never drop me out of your life again,” she murmured with confident wistfulness. “Never, Ban.... Let’s go in.”
Not until she came to bid him good-night, with a lingering handclasp, her palm cleaving to his like the reluctant severance of lips, did she tell him that she was going away almost immediately. “But I had to make sure first that you were really alive, and still Ban,” she said.
It was many months before he saw her again.