Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so. "Oh, my God!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!" * * * * * I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap, and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me as one soothes a child. After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray, and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone. Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while with all her might in silence. At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?" It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for, and I said so. She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!" We tried again hard; but it was useless. She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then at me again, with great wistfulness, and shivered, and finally began to speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of all she wanted to say besides. "Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not be any more; we are going to change all that. "Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back, even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo. "Nobody has ever come back before. "I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.