She laid her palms, on the new shoulders of this friend of her childhood, and flooded him with her victorious smile.
"What have you done to yourself?" she laughed, rather wildly. "Where do you come from? India?"
"I went on to China."
He had traveled up the Yangtze River, had crossed Tse-Chouan, had reached the borders of Thibet. Her happy look continued to embrace him; but she hardly heard what he said. She did not perceive that he had undertaken that journey in imitation of the other—perhaps in the hope of finding in those distant, hard places the secret of Lawrence Teck's attractiveness. And, in fact, he looked stronger in spirit as well as in body. The hypochondriac, the timid dilettante, seemed to have slunk away; in his place stood a man who had forced himself, against all his natural instincts, to endure extremes of cold and heat, dirt and famine, hardship and danger. Even now his face was calm; but he could not keep his eyes from shining at her.
"You'll stay to dinner, Cornie. Just us."
From the doorway she came rushing back to throw her arms round him, and cry like a delighted child:
"Dear old Cornie! I'm so happy!"
CHAPTER XXV
As for David Verne, despite the extraordinary prostration in which Lilla had found him, it seemed that he had not passed beyond the vivifying powers of love, which sometimes appear to change the body, as well as the mind, into a new organism for a while. Week after week, to the bewilderment—one might almost say the consternation—of the physician, he refused to imitate the customary progress of that disease which had been diagnosed as his. And while he acknowledged that this phenomenon must presently end, David knew that for the moment, at any rate, love had proved stronger than death.