He went to the foot of the stair.  Quietly, in his shoeless feet, he began to climb them.  He wanted to cry out Marette’s name even before he came to the top.  He wanted to reach up to her with his arms outstretched.  But he came silently to her door and looked in.

She lay in a crumpled, huddled heap on her bed.  Her face was hidden, and all about her lay her smothering hair.  For a moment he was frightened.  He could not see that she was breathing.  So still was she that she was like one dead.

His footsteps were unheard as he moved across the room.  He knelt down beside her, reached out his arms, and gathered her into them.

“Marette!” he cried in a low voice.

He felt the sudden quiver, like a little shock, that ran through her.  He crushed his face down, so that it lay in her hair, still damp from its wetting.  He drew her closer, tightening his arms about her slender body, and a little cry came from her a cry that was a broken thing, a sob without tears.

“Marette!”

It was all he said.  It was all he could say in that moment when his heart was beating like a drum against her breast.  And then he felt the slow pressure of her hands against him, saw her white face, her wide, staring eyes within a few inches of his own, and she drew away from him, back against the wall, still huddled like a child on the bed, with her eyes fixed on him in a way that frightened him.  There were no tears in them.  She had not been crying.  But her face was as white as he had seen it down in Kedsty’s room.  Some of the horror and shock had gone out of it.  In it was another look as her eyes glowed upon Kent.  It was a look of incredulity, of disbelief, a thing slowly fading away under the miracle of an amazing revelation.  The truth thrust itself upon him.

Marette had not expected that he would come to her like this.  She had believed that he would take flight into the night, escaping from her as he would have run from a plague.  She put up her two hands, in the trick they had of groping at her white throat, and her lips formed a word which she did not speak.

Kent, to his own amazement, was smiling and still on his knees.  He pulled himself to his feet, and stood up straight, looking down at her in that same strange, comforting, all-powerful way.  The thrill of it was passing into her veins.  A flush of color was driving the deathly pallor from her face.  Her lips were parted, and she breathed quickly, a little excitedly.

“I thought—­you would go!” she said.

“Not without you,” he said.  “I have come to take you with me.”

He drew out his watch.  It was two o’clock.  He held it down so that she could look at the dial.

“If the storm keeps up, we have three hours before dawn,” he said.  “How soon can you be ready, Marette?”

He was fighting to make his voice quiet and unexcited.  It was a terrific struggle.  And Marette was not blind to it.  She drew herself from the bed and stood up before him, her two hands still clasped at her throbbing throat.