Just the one word of the muttered sentence was distinguishable, but she knew it was not Bayard's voice; knew, then, whose it must be. Very quietly she walked to the doorway of the bedroom and stood there. Ned Lytton had halted a step from the kitchen entry and was wiping his face with a black silk kerchief. He completed the operation, removed his hat, tossed it to a chair, unbuttoned the neck of his shirt ... and ceased all movements. For each the wordless, soundless period that followed seemed to be an age. The woman looked at the man with a slight feeling of giddiness, a sensation that was at once relief and horror, for he was as her worst fears would have it; his face, in spite of his weeks of good living, was the color of suet, purple sacks under the eyes, lips hard and cruel, and from chin to brow were the indelible marks of wasting, of debauchery. "Ann!" he exclaimed. Surprise, dread, a mingling of many emotions was in the tone, and he waited at high tension for her to answer. His wife, a woman he had not seen in three years, standing there before him in the garb of this new country, beautiful, desirable, come as though from thin air! He thought this might be merely an hallucination, that it might be some uncanny creation of his unstable mind. "Yes, Ned; it is I," she answered, with a catch in her voice. On her words he stepped quickly forward, fear gone, eagerness about him. He took her hands in his, fondling them nervously, and had she not swayed back from him to the slightest noticeable degree, he would have followed out his prompting to take her lips with as much matter-of-factness as he had clutched her hands. "Ann, where did you come from?" he cried. "Why, I thought maybe you were a ... a ghost or something! Oh, I'm glad to see you!" "Are you, Ned?"--almost plaintively, stroking the back of one of his hands as she looked into his lighted eyes, reading sadly the desire behind that shallow joy at sight of her. "Are you really glad?" "Of course I'm glad! Who wouldn't be? Gad, Ann, you're in fine shape!"--stepping back from her, still holding her hands, and looking her up and down, greedily. "Oh, you're good to look at!" He went close to her again and reached out one arm quickly to slip it about her waist, but she turned away from him quite casually and he stopped, disconcerted, hurt, humiliated, but covering the fact as well as he could. An awkward fraction of a minute followed, which he broke by asking: "But where did you come from, Ann? How did you get here? How did you know? What brought you?" She smiled wanly. "One at a time, Ned. You brought me. You should know that. I came out here to find you, to see what was happening, to help you if I could." She allowed him to take her hands again and looked wistfully into his face as she talked. A change came into his expression with her words and his gaze shifted from hers while a show of petulance appeared in his slightly drawn brows.