It seemed that this was all as it should be, and yet there was something lacking,—a great gap, whose images and happenings were wiped out as a cloth wipes clean a slate,—a space of darkness, of blankness, whose empty void held prescience of some great sadness. He lay on his side facing the fire, and twice he thought to speak to Ridgar with a question of this strangeness, and each time he was conscious of a vast surprise that the man did not answer.
His lips, so long unused to sane direction, had made no sound in the roar of the night.
And then Ridgar, drawn by that intangible sense of eyes upon him, raised his head; and, as their glances met, that great void flashed suddenly into full panoply of life peopled with a ring of painted faces against the background of a night forest, a leaping fire, and the heroic figure of a tall woman who stood in the dancing light and threw a hatchet at a painted post.
Ridgar's eyes, as he had seen them in the dimness of the outskirts of that massed circle, brought back the lost period of time and all that had passed therein.
He stared wildly at him, and then around the firelit room.
“Ah!” said Ridgar softly, getting slowly to his feet with a smile at once tender and exaggeratedly calm. “You have awakened, have you; eh, lad? Would you sleep the whole night away as well as the day?”
He came to the bed and took McElroy's hand tenderly in his, while he gave Rette a warning glance.
McElroy tried to rise, but only his head obeyed, lifting itself a bit from the pillow to fall helplessly back.
He looked up at Ridgar with a look that cut that good man's heart, so full was it of wild entreaty and piteous grief.
“Maren?” whispered the weak lips. “Maren,—where—?” And they, too, failed him.