Then I told myself that I was going mad from dwelling too long on one thought. I must speak and break the spell. As I opened my lips, a sudden searching conviction fell upon me like a lightning flash that this was indeed she, the one woman in the world to me.
I gasped out: “Elizabeth!”
The maiden turned, and for the first time caught sight of me standing thus in the doorway. She gave one low cry of “Thou!”
After that one word we faced each other in blank silence. The folk in books have ever some pat speech ready for such a moment; but in real life ‘tis not so. How could I speak when my brain was whirling like a millwheel, and my voice choked in my throat? I stood still and looked upon her, and the longer I looked, the harder I found it to believe my eyes were not playing me a trick.
Yet ‘twas but the truth they told me. There she sat—she that had been brought up to be tended and waited upon, and compassed about with luxuries, now sick and suffering, with only a wooden armchair to rest upon, and a cottage roof to shelter her. How, in God’s name, had it come to pass?
Her face was deadly pale, for all she had been three months on the sea; and now, as she gazed at me, she grew even whiter, and swayed as though she would fall in a swoon. But all the while she kept her eyes fixed steadfastly on mine. They were eyes never to be forgotten by one who had seen them once. I have heard folks praise the brilliancy of her glance and the curling length of her eye-lashes; but, to her lover, there lay a subtler charm in the tender trouble of her eye-brows, bending slightly downward toward the inner corner. I noted it now as distinctly as the drowning man counts the bubbles in the water.
I was the first to find my voice, and I hated myself that it sounded hard and stern, when I was mad to fling myself at her feet and entreat her to trust herself to me. But that abominable diffidence of mine, which is so akin to pride, made me seem in her eyes, I doubt not, like a pragmatical schoolmaster chiding a recreant child.
“Elizabeth Romney!—am I dreaming, or is it indeed thou—come on the ship with the maids?”
An angry flush swept over the whiteness of her cheek and rose to meet the hair that curled in childish rings round her little ears.