I had a moment of thinking as I opened the door and found the lights turned on, that my maid had left them so in anticipation of my return, and then I saw him. He was sitting by the dying fire; he had not heard me come up the stair, for his head was in his hands. He turned then at my exclamation, and I had time, before we crossed the width of the room to one another, to think that the attitude in which I had found him and the new writing of anxiety in his face, as he turned it to me, had its source in his finding me in what looked like a permanent relation to a theatre of my own. For a moment I thought that, and then my apprehension was buried on his breast. "Oh, my love, my love!" He held me off from him to let his eyes rove tenderly over my face, my breast, my hair. I do not know if he remembered the words he had spoken to me so long ago, or if they came spontaneously to the command of the old desire: "Oh, you beauty--you wonder...." Presently we moved to sit down, and stumbled over his bag upon the floor beside his chair. It brought me back to the miracle of his being there and to the certainty that he must have come to me direct from the steamer. "On the _Cunarder_," he admitted, "six days and a half. O Lord!" His gesture was expressive of the extreme weariness of impatience. "I came ashore with the quarantine officers. I couldn't cable. I left at two hours' notice." It occurred to me that he must have at least come ashore before sunset, and in that case he couldn't have come straight to me. I began to feel something ominous in the presence there of his bag. His overcoat, though the evening was so warm, lay beyond him on another chair. It flashed over me in a wild way that he had come to some sudden determination--he had been at the theatre that night--he had taken my being there in that circumstance as final--perhaps he meant to abandon me to my art, to surrender me at least to its more importunate claim. He followed my thought dully from far off. "I was at the theatre in time for your part," he said. "There wasn't a seat, but they knew me at the box office and let me in." "Then it _was_ you that I saw in the balcony, and in Sanderson's box? I thought it was a vision." "I had business with Sanderson." He turned back to what was beginning to make itself felt through his profound preoccupation, the charm of my presence. "There was that in your acting to-night that would have evoked visions," he smiled. "I had them myself." I knelt down on the floor beside his knees. "Helmeth, tell me," I begged. He began to stroke my face with his hand. "It doesn't seem so bad as it did a few moments ago, and yet it is bad enough. I must leave for Mexico in an hour."