He was dressed as if for an outing, in knickerbockers and huge, hob-nailed shoes.  He wore an old shooting-coat and a woollen cap; a little leather sack was slung from his shoulder, and in his hand he carried a short-handled geologist’s hammer.

And then, after so long a time, Lloyd saw his face again—­the rugged, unhandsome face; the massive jaw, huge almost to deformity; the great, brutal, indomitable lips; the square-cut chin with its forward, aggressive thrust; the narrow forehead, seamed and contracted, and the twinkling, keen eyes so marred by the cast, so heavily shadowed by the shaggy eyebrows.  When he spoke the voice came heavy and vibrant from the great chest, a harsh, deep bass, a voice in which to command men, not a voice in which to talk to women.

Lloyd, long schooled to self-repression and the control of her emotions when such repression and control were necessary, sat absolutely moveless on her high seat, her hands only shutting tighter and tighter upon the reins.  She had often wondered how she would feel, what was to be her dominant impulse, at such moments as these, and now she realised that it was not so much joy, not so much excitement, as a resolute determination not for one instant to lose her poise.

She was thinking rapidly.  For four years they had not met.  At one time she believed him to be dead.  But in the end he had been saved, had come back, and, ignoring the plaudits of an entire Christendom, had addressed himself straight to her.  For one of them, at least, this meeting was a crisis.  What would they first say to each other? how be equal to the situation? how rise to its dramatic possibilities?  But the moment had come to them suddenly, had found them all unprepared.  There was no time to think of adequate words.  Afterward, when she reviewed this encounter, she told herself that they both had failed, and that if the meeting had been faithfully reproduced upon the stage or in the pages of a novel it would have seemed tame and commonplace.  These two, living the actual scene, with all the deep, strong, real emotions of them surging to the surface, the vitality of them, all aroused and vibrating, suddenly confronting actuality itself, were not even natural; were not even “true to life.”  It was as though they had parted but a fortnight ago.

Bennett caught his cap from his head and came toward her, exclaiming: 

“Miss Searight, I believe.”

And she, reaching her right hand over the left, that still held the reins, leaned from her high seat, shaking hands with him and replying: 

“Well—­Mr. Bennett, I’m so very glad to see you again.  Where did you come from?”

“From the City—­and from seventy-six degrees north latitude.”

“I congratulate you.  We had almost given up hope of you.”

“Thank you,” he answered.  “We were not so roseate with hope ourselves—­all the time.  But I have not felt as though I had really come back until this—­well, until I had reached—­the road between Bannister and Fourth Lake, for instance,” and his face relaxed to its characteristic grim smile.