"Fool!" I muttered savagely, to hide my own fears. "You don't know what you're talking about. It's the new Barbara—the child—about which we're concerned to-night. She's gone."
"And the old Barbara come back," he said; and stood there shuddering, with his face hidden in his hands.
I left him, and went back towards the house. It seemed as though I was shaken to my very soul, as though something mysterious and wonderful was in the very air itself, threatening me. I pushed open the gate leading into the grounds, and peered in, like a little child afraid of the dark; then I went in, picking my way cautiously through the ruined and neglected garden, with my eyes fixed upon the terrace. Coming to it, I crept among the shadows, and peered in.
Murray Olivant was no longer there; but in his usual chair, with the decanter and a glass beside him, sat Lucas Savell in the lighted room in a heavy slumber. And once again from that opposite end of the terrace I saw the shadowy woman creep forward, and look into the room. With my very hair rising, as it seemed, and my limbs trembling, I took a step towards her, and called her name—
"Barbara!"
After a moment she came slowly towards me, and by the light that came from the room I looked into her eyes. Then with a great cry I fell at her feet, feeling that I held in mine warm hands of flesh and blood.
"Barbara!"
"I've come back—my dear—my dear—to save my child," said the voice of the Barbara I had loved and lost twenty years before.
Inside the lighted room the man whose name she bore started, and shook himself, and fell asleep again; outside in the cold and the darkness I knelt at the feet of the woman I loved, and bowed my face upon her hands, as I had done twenty years before in the same spot.