“Poor old Clytie—­but you see yesterday all day I felt queer—­very queer, and wrought up, and last night I couldn’t rest, and I lay awake and excited all night—­and something seemed to give way when I saw you in the door.  Of course it was nervousness, and I shall be all right now—­”

She looked up and saw Bernal staring at her—­standing in the doorway of the big room, his face shading into the dusk back of him.  She went to him with both hands out and he kissed her.

“Is it Nance?”

“I don’t know—­but it’s really Bernal.”

“Clytie says you knew I had come.”

“Clytie must have misunderstood.  No one even intimated such a thing.  I came up to-day—­I had to come—­because—­if I had known you were here, wouldn’t I have brought Allan?”

“Of course I was going to let you know, and come down in a few days—­there was some business to do here.  Dear old Allan!  I’m aching to get a stranglehold on him!”

“Yes—­he’ll be so glad—­there’s so much to say!”

“I didn’t know whom I should find here.”

“We’ve had Clytie look after both houses—­sometimes we’ve rented mine—­and almost every summer we’ve come here.”

“You know I didn’t dream I was rich until I got here.  The lawyer says they’ve advertised, but I’ve been away from everything most of the time—­not looking out for advertisements.  I can’t understand the old gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a thoroughly decent chap.”

“Oh, hardly a reprobate!”

“Worse, Nance—­an ass—­think of my talking to that dear old soul as I did—­taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith.  I shudder when I remember it.  And yet I honestly thought he might be made to see things my way.”

Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of their last parting—­that singular moment when they blindly groped for each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling handclasp!  Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength?  For all time since—­and increasingly during the later years—­secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn.  It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled—­those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other—­faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty.

Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.  Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp—­the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands.  There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment.  Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.