They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot.

Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one.  And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her.  The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence.  Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny.  Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.

As she watched him, there were two of her:  one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman—­listening, waiting, judging.  She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.

Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged.  Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness.  As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together—­with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.

Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home.  Before them the lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered her way to womanhood.  Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her dreaming girlhood must be to the present.  Should she enter it, she knew the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled rooms.

And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy.  Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal’s devising had frightened them for the last time—­when in a sudden flash of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding.  One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child’s faith in the Gratcher.  He had replied that, as an institution, the Gratcher was imperishable—­that it was brute humanity’s instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child’s Gratcher was not the man’s, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity:  that the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter him when he hears God’s call to live.