She never understood just how and when that assurance came to her.  It was certainly not by actual recognition of his features, as it was not by putting together the few data that came under her observation.  Thinking it over in after years, she could only say that she “just found herself knowing it.”  He was there—­beside her.  Of that she had no longer a doubt.

Her amazement did not develop all at once.  Indeed, the position had an odd naturalness, like something in a dream.  The element of impossibility in what had happened was so great that for the time being her mind refused to meet it.  She was only aware of that vague sense of satisfaction, of inward peace, that comes when long-desired ends have been fulfilled.

The main fact being accepted, her outer faculties could respond to the call that a dinner-party makes on its least important member.  When the conversation at her end of the table became general she took her part, and later engaged in a three-cornered discussion with Wayne and Mary Pole on the subject of an endowed theatre; but all the while her subconscious mind was struggling for a theory to account for Norrie Ford’s presence in that particular room and in that unexpected company.  The need of some immediate, plausible reason for so astounding an occurrence deadened her attention to the comparative quietness with which she accepted his coming—­now that she had regained her self-control, although she was conscious of stirrings of wild joy in this evidence that he had been true to her.  Had she recalled what she had said to him eight years ago as to the Argentine, and the “very good firm to work for,” she would have had an easy clew, but that had passed from her mind almost with the utterance—­certainly with his departure He had gone out into the world, leaving no more trace behind him than the bird that has flown southward.  Not once during the intervening years did the thought cross her mind that words which she had spoken nearly at haphazard could have acted as a guide to him, while still less did she dream that they could have led him into the very seat beside her which he was occupying now.

Nevertheless, he was there, and for the present she could dispense with the knowledge of the adventures that had brought him.  He was there, and that was the reason of his coming in itself.  He had hewn his way through all difficulties to reach her—­as Siegfried came to Brunhild, over the mountains and through the fire.  He had found the means—­both the means and the daring—­to enter and make himself accepted in her own world, her own circle, her own family—­in so far as she had a family—­and to sit right down at her side.