It was the telephone that called him from his vision.  It rang fiercely.

He lifted the thing from his desk and answered—­and as the small voice inside it spoke he dropped the receiver with a crash.  He trembled violently as he picked it up, but he told himself he was wrong—­he had been mistaken—­yet it was a startlingly beautiful voice; startlingly kind, too, and ineffably like the one he hungered most to hear.

“Who?” he said, his own voice shaking—­like his hand.

“Mary.”

He responded with two hushed and incredulous words:  “Is it?”

There was a little thrill of pathetic half-laughter in the instrument.  “Bibbs—­I wanted to—­just to see if you—­”

“Yes—­Mary?”

“I was looking when you were so nearly run over.  I saw it, Bibbs.  They said you hadn’t been hurt, they thought, but I wanted to know for myself.”

“No, no, I wasn’t hurt at all—­Mary.  It was father who came nearer it.  He saved me.”

“Yes, I saw; but you had fallen.  I couldn’t get through the crowd until you had gone.  And I wanted to know.”

“Mary—­would you—­have minded?” he said.

There was a long interval before she answered.

“Yes.”

“Then why—­”

“Yes, Bibbs?”

“I don’t know what to say,” he cried.  “It’s so wonderful to hear your voice again—­I’m shaking, Mary—­I—­I don’t know—­I don’t know anything except that I am talking to you!  It is you—­Mary?”

“Yes, Bibbs!”

“Mary—­I’ve seen you from my window at home—­only five times since I—­since then.  You looked—­oh, how can I tell you?  It was like a man chained in a cave catching a glimpse of the blue sky, Mary.  Mary, won’t you—­let me see you again—­near?  I think I could make you really forgive me—­you’d have to—­”

“I did—­then.”

“No—­not really—­or you wouldn’t have said you couldn’t see me any more.”

“That wasn’t the reason.”  The voice was very low.

“Mary,” he said, even more tremulously than before, “I can’t—­you couldn’t mean it was because—­you can’t mean it was because you—­ care?”

There was no answer.

“Mary?” he called, huskily.  “If you mean that—­you’d let me see you—­wouldn’t you?”

And now the voice was so low he could not be sure it spoke at all, but if it did, the words were, “Yes, Bibbs—­dear.”

But the voice was not in the instrument—­it was so gentle and so light, so almost nothing, it seemed to be made of air—­and it came from the air.

Slowly and incredulously he turned—­and glory fell upon his shining eyes.  The door of his father’s room had opened.

Mary stood upon the threshold.

The end