He almost scowled for it.  “As different as that—?”

Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world.  “Haven’t you exactly wanted to know how different?  So this morning,” she said, “you appeared to me.”

“Like him?”

“A black stranger!”

“Then how did you know it was I?”

“Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been—­to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you.  In the midst of that you came to me—­that my wonder might be answered.  So I knew,” she went on; “and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself.  And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had—­and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me of that.  So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?”

It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet.  “You ‘like’ that horror—?”

“I could have liked him.  And to me,” she said, “he was no horror.  I had accepted him.”

“’Accepted’—?” Brydon oddly sounded.

“Before, for the interest of his difference—­yes.  And as I didn’t disown him, as I knew him—­which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t, my dear,—­well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me.  And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.”

She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand—­still with her arm supporting him.  But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, “You ‘pitied’ him?” he grudgingly, resentfully asked.

“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,” she said.

“And haven’t I been unhappy?  Am not I—­you’ve only to look at me!—­ravaged?”

“Ah I don’t say I like him better,” she granted after a thought.  “But he’s grim, he’s worn—­and things have happened to him.  He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.”

“No”—­it struck Brydon; “I couldn’t have sported mine ‘down-town.’  They’d have guyed me there.”

“His great convex pince-nez—­I saw it, I recognised the kind—­is for his poor ruined sight.  And his poor right hand—!”

“Ah!” Brydon winced—­whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers.  Then, “He has a million a year,” he lucidly added.  “But he hasn’t you.”

“And he isn’t—­no, he isn’t—­you!” she murmured, as he drew her to his breast.