She smiled then and spoke.  “It is really I. I’ve come with a message for you.”

Until she spoke he could do nothing but stare as one would at an hallucinatory vision; but her voice, the first articulate syllable of it, brought him to his feet and drew him across the room to where she stood.  He was almost suffocated by a sudden convulsion of the heart, half exultation, half terror.  The exultation was accountable enough.  The high Gods had given him another chance.  Why he should be terrified he did not at the time know, but he was—­from that very first moment.

He came to her slowly, not knowing what he was to do or say.  All his mental powers were for the moment quite in abeyance.  But when he got within hand’s reach of her it was given to him to take both of hers and stoop and kiss them.  He’d have knelt to her had his knees ever been habituated to prayer.  Then he led her to his big hollow-backed easy chair which stood in the dormer where the breeze came in, changed its position a little and waited until, with a faintly audible sigh, she had let herself sink into it.

How tired she was!  He had become aware of that the moment he touched her hands.  Whatever her experience during the last days or weeks had been, it had brought her to the end of her powers.

He felt another pang of that unaccountable terror as he turned away, and he put up an unaddressed prayer for spiritual guidance.  It was a new humility for him.  He moved his own chair a little nearer, but not close, and seated himself.

“I can conceive of no message,”—­they were the first words he had spoken, and his voice was not easily manageable,—­“no message that would be more than nothing compared with the fact that you have come.”  Rising again, he went on, “Won’t you let me take your hat?  Then the back of that chair won’t be in the way.”

It was certainly a point in his favor that she took it off and gave it to him without demur.  That meant that there would be time; yet her very docility frightened him.  She seemed quite relaxed now that her head could lie back against the leather cushion, and her gaze traveled about the dingy littered room with a kind of tender inquisitiveness as if she were memorizing its contents.

He gazed at her until a gush of tears blinded his eyes and he turned, blinking them away, to the untidy quires of score paper which he had tried to choose instead.  It could not be that it was too late to alter that choice.  The terror, for a moment, became articulate.  She believed that it was too late.  That was why she had come.

She spoke reflectively.  “It would be called an accident, I suppose, that I came.  I wrote to you but there was more to the message than would go easily in a note so I took it myself to your house.  There was just a chance, I thought, that I’d find you there.  I didn’t find you, but I found Miss MacArthur.  That was the only thing about it that could be called accidental.  Your