He drew a hand to his forehead and placed a finger on the scar.  “I got that seven years ago.  It killed a half of Derwent Conniston, the part that should have lived.  Do you understand?  Until tonight—­”

Her eyes startled him, they were growing so big and dark and staring, living fires of understanding and horror.  It was hard for him to go on with the lie.  “For many weeks I was dead,” he struggled on.  “And when I came to life physically, I had forgotten a great deal.  I had my name, my identity, but only ghastly dreams and visions of what had gone before.  I remembered you, but it was in a dream, a strange and haunting dream that was with me always.  It seems to me that for an age I have been seeking for a face, a voice, something I loved above all else on earth, something which was always near and yet was never found.  It was you, Mary Josephine, you!”

Was it the real Derwent Conniston speaking now?  He felt again that overwhelming force from within which was not his own.  The thing that had begun as a lie struck him now as a thing that was truth.  It was he, John Keith, who had been questing and yearning and hoping.  It was John Keith, and not Conniston, who had returned into a world filled with a desolation of loneliness, and it was to John Keith that a beneficent God had sent this wonderful creature in an hour that was blackest in its despair.  He was not lying now.  He was fighting.  He was fighting to keep for himself the one atom of humanity that meant more to him than all the rest of the human race, fighting to keep a great love that had come to him out of a world in which he no longer had a friend or a home, and to that fight his soul went out as a drowning man grips at a spar on a sea.  As the girl’s hands came to his face and he heard the yearning, grief-filled cry of his name on her lips, he no longer sensed the things he was saying, but held her close in his arms, kissing her mouth, and her eyes, and her hair, and repeating over and over again that now he had found her he would never give her up.  Her arms clung to him.  They were like two children brought together after a long separation, and Keith knew that Conniston’s love for this girl who was his sister must have been a splendid thing.  And his lie had saved Conniston as well as himself.  There had been no time to question the reason for the Englishman’s neglect—­for his apparent desertion of the girl who had come across the sea to find him.  Tonight it was sufficient that he was Conniston, and that to him the girl had fallen as a precious heritage.

He stood up with her at last, holding her away from him a little so that he could look into her face wet with tears and shining with happiness.  She reached up a hand to his face, so that it touched the scar, and in her eyes he saw an infinite pity, a luminously tender glow of love and sympathy and understanding that no measurements could compass.  Gently her hand stroked his scarred forehead.  He felt his old world slipping away from under his feet, and with his triumph there surged over him a thankfulness for that indefinable something that had come to him in time to give him the strength and the courage to lie.  For she believed him, utterly and without the shadow of a suspicion she believed him.