"Day and night I have been thinking of you, dreaming of you,
and cursing myself because I believed I had killed you. And now I find
you alive. And _here!_"
She was so near that the hands he clasped lay against his breast. But
reason had returned to him, and he saw the folly of dreams.
"It is difficult to believe. Out there I thought I was sick. Perhaps I
am. But if I am not sick, and you are really you, I am glad. If I wake
up and find I have imagined it all, as I imagined so many of the
other things--"
He laughed, freeing her hands and looking into eyes shining half out of
tears at him. But he did not finish. She drew away from him, with a
lingering of her finger-tips on his arm, and the little heart-beat in
her throat revealed itself clearly again as on that night in his cabin.
"I have been thinking of you back there, every hour, every step," he
said, making a gesture toward the tundras over which he had come. "Then
I heard the firecrackers and saw the flag. It is almost as if I had
created you!"
A quick answer was on her lips, but she stopped it.
"And when I found you here, and you didn't fade away like a ghost, I
thought something was wrong with my head. Something must have been
wrong, I guess, or I wouldn't have done _that_. You see, it puzzled me
that a ghost should be setting off firecrackers--and I suppose that was
the first impulse I had of making sure you were real.
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