“Dear, you should know my voice.”
“You, John! is it you? Oh, but you frightened me! I heard something climbing, and was shivering in a corner.”
Now John Gore seemed suddenly to forget the eighty feet of space below him. His heart had given a great leap and was drumming against his ribs, for the truth that he had discovered went far beyond his dreams. The window was cut in the thickness of the wall, and the stanchions set deeply in it, so that he contrived to drag himself over the sill and wedge himself there with his face close to the bars.
“Thank God,” he said, “that I dared this climb! It was a climb into the dark, dear, but I have found more than ever I sought.”
He saw her hands come up to the bars. They touched his face, and then drew back as though she had not thought him so near. Her heart was so full of manifold emotions that for the moment she could not think. The suddenness of it had dizzied her, and yet through the strange tumult of it all she felt an infinite sweet joy.
“Barbe!”
His voice roused her suddenly to a sense of keen reality.
“Speak softly, or they may hear. You—you should not have risked so much.”
“Barbe, why are you here, and why did they tell me lies?”
“Lies?”