It was with a curiously relaxed body, her chin cradled in the crook of her arm that lay along the back of the couch, her eyes unfocused on the window, that the girl listened to it.

Primarily, indeed, she wasn’t exactly listening.  Much of the narrative went by almost unheard.  Much of the philosophy she hardly tried to understand.  What was constantly present and more and more poignantly vivid with every five minutes that ticked away on the banjo clock, was a consciousness of the man himself, the driving power of him, the boisterous health and freshness and confidence.  She was conscious, too, of something formidable—­carelessly exultant in his own strength.  She got to thinking of the flight of a great bird wheeling up higher and higher on his powerful wings.

He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond her own powers.  He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn’t be through weakness.  At what he said about riding on the backs of one’s own passions, her imagination varied the picture so that she saw him galloping splendidly by.

At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing up with tears.  She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.

Presently he stopped short in his walk—­stopped talking, with a gasp, in the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face.  She couldn’t see his clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long breath.  Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a mortal endless minute, there was a silence.

At last she found something—­it didn’t matter much what—­to say, and the conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had been for the first ten minutes after he had come in.  But, paradoxically, this superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the thing that underlay it.  Something had happened during that moment while he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous, critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for.

And it had happened to him, too.  The memory of his silhouette as he stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would have convinced her, had she needed convincing.

The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that was his as well as hers, for breathing-space—­for time for the recovery of lost bearings.  Had he not felt it as well as she—­she smiled a little over this—­he wouldn’t have yielded.  The man on horseback would have taken an obstacle like that without breaking the stride of his gallop.

What underlay her quiet meaningless chat, was wonder and fear, and more deeply still, a sort of cosmic contentment—­the acquiescence of a swimmer in the still irresistible current of a mighty river.

It was distinctly a relief to her when her mother came in and, presently, Portia.  She introduced him to them, and then dropped out of the conversation altogether.  As if it were a long way off, she heard him retailing last night’s adventure and expressing his regret that he hadn’t taken her to Frederica (that was his sister, Mrs. Whitney) to be dried out, before he sent her home.