“We find we know one another and we meet out here! It is almost too much to credit.”
On the mellow brown steppe they were two figures silhouetted against the sky, a bronzed man in khaki and a beautiful woman in blue and scarlet. They were walking rather close together.
In the far distance sounded a long-drawn whistle—the east-bound freight. They had to return. But their Amethyst Moment had slipped into Memory!
V
“Look here, Forge,” cried a young surgeon angrily, when he came through the train a quarter-hour later, “what the devil did you say to that Theddon girl that she should come back, lock herself in her compartment and shed tears all over the place? The nurses up front are all talking about it.”
“Say to her? Tears? Me? Why, I didn’t say anything to her. Is she weeping?”
“I said so, didn’t I? What the devil’s happened, anyhow? Have you ever known her before?”
“From the beginning of the world, old man!”
“You’re bughouse!” snapped the doctor. “You haven’t come out of the ether. The beginning of the world! Night before last you were seeing stars. You’re a nut! Jack, where’s that morphine? Give this coot another shot!”