“And after—­after that, how long before you can marry me?”

She twinkled at him mischievously.  “So, after all these years, my lover makes me an offer of marriage.  Why didn’t you ask me at Manzanita?”

“Good God!  Would it possibly—­”

“No; no!  I shouldn’t have said it.  I was teasing.”

“You know that there’s never been a moment when the one thing worth living and fighting and striving for wasn’t you.”

“And success?” she taunted, but with tenderness.

“Another name for you.  I wanted it only as the reflex of your wish for me.”

“Even when I’d left you?”

“Even when you’d left me.”

“Poor Ban!” she breathed, and for a moment her fingers fluttered at his cheek.  “Have I made it up to you?”

He bent over the long, low chair in which she half reclined.  “A thousand times!  Every day that I see you; every day that I think of you; with the lightest touch of your hand; the sound of your voice; the turn of your face toward me.  I’m jealous of it and fearful of it.  Can you wonder that I live in a torment of dread lest something happen to bring it all to ruin?”

She shook her head.  “Nothing could.  Unless—­No.  I won’t say it.  I want you to want to marry me, Ban.  But—­I wonder.”

As they talked, the little light of late afternoon had dwindled, until in their nook they could see each other only as vague forms.

“Isn’t there a table-lamp there?” she asked.  “Turn it on.”

He found and pulled the chain.  The glow, softly shaded, irradiated Io’s lineaments, showing her thoughtful, somber, even a little apprehensive.  She lifted the shade and turned it to throw the direct rays upon Banneker.  He blinked.

“Do you mind?” she asked softly.  Even more softly, she added, “Do you remember?”

His mind veered back across the years, full of struggle, of triumph, of emptiness, of fulfillment, to a night in another world; a world of dreams, magic associations, high and peaceful ambitions, into which had broken a voice and an appeal from the darkness.  He had turned the light upon himself then that she might see him for what he was and have no fear.  So he held it now, lifting it above his forehead.  Hypnotized by the compulsion of memory, she said, as she had said to the unknown helper in the desert shack: 

“I don’t know you.  Do I?”

“Io!”

“Ah!  I didn’t mean to say that.  It came back to me, Ban.  Perhaps it’s true. Do I know you?”

As in the long ago he answered her:  “Are you afraid of me?”

“Of everything.  Of the future.  Of what I don’t know in you.”

“There’s nothing of me that you don’t know,” he averred.

“Isn’t there?” She was infinitely wistful; avid of reassurance.  Before he could answer she continued:  “That night in the rain when I first saw you, under the flash, as I see you now—­Ban, dear, how little you’ve changed, how wonderfully little, to the eye!—­the instant I saw you, I trusted you.”