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.
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