Glancing at Maarten, she saw that he was bathing his scorched, sooty face and wrapping a wet handkerchief about his hands, also that the brush fire had caught his beard and singed it all away. At her exclamation of regret and pity, he turned, then stood upright before her with folded arms, his eyes fixed directly on hers. In the short interval the outline of his face had changed, solidified, and the firmness of mouth and chin was revealed. Brooke’s heart stood still, and then surged, in wild, clamorous beating. “Lorenz!” she cried. “Lorenz! Oh, why have I not always known you? This explains everything! Why did you come here like this? Why did you change your name and turn into a labourer?” Her voice had an unconscious reproach in it,—or at least the man so heard it,—and a light that had gleamed through all the smut and scorch died from his eyes; while half kneeling, half crouching, on the bank among the bleached ferns and feathering seed-stalks, her hair fallen to her shoulders, bright colour succeeding the pallor of fear, looking again the gypsy ruler of the River Kingdom, Brooke waited for the explanation of the man who stood before her. Slowly it came, and the voice, from which the feigned accent was dropped, trembled at first, but grew stronger with fervour every moment. “Why did I come? To see you! Why did I come as a farm labourer? That is to what I was born, back in the little tulip farm that I have often told you of, near Haarlem. Also it was the only way that I might both be near and serve you. My name is my own, as was that by which you first knew me—Henri Lorenz Maarten—Lorenz being my mother’s maiden name, and by it I was as often called in the days I spent with my uncle, who brought me up, as Maarten, the name of my father, who died so long ago. In Paris my friends reversed the titles, student fashion, to please themselves, and I for the time became Maarten or Marte Lorenz.” Why did he stand there, stern and aloof? Could he not read her thoughts, Brooke wondered. Did he not fathom the deep undercurrent upon which her questions had merely floated like bits of driftage? No; what Maarten saw before him, as he looked, was that scene in the July woods—a young woman with eyes cast down, the suitor with eyes aflame pressing kisses upon her hands. That the man was dead did not obliterate the vision. Maarten had resolved to make his own confession, complete and unmistakable, and then to go his way. Not knowing this, Brooke let her thoughts fly to him in eager questions. “The picture! Tell me of ‘Eucharistia’ and the meaning of the light in it, and how you found me here when the papers said that you had gone to work and study in Brittany.” “Did they say that? I did not know it, for I came direct from home, where I had seen my mother. As to the picture, it is a long story. Shall I tell it to you now or write it down and leave it when I go? You will be chilled, perhaps, if you wait longer.” “Then you _are_ going?”