"Are you really, Pat? Are you truly here?" he murmured, still watching her avidly. "I--I still don't believe it. I waited here for hours and hours last night, and I'd given up hope for tonight, or any night. But I would have come again and again." She started as he bent suddenly toward her, but he was merely examining her face. She saw the gleam of horror in his expression as his eyes surveyed the faintly visible bruise on her cheek, the red mark on her chin. "Oh my God, Pat!" His words were barely audible. "Oh my God!" he repeated, drawing away from her and resuming the attitude of desolation in which her arrival had found him. "I've hoped it wasn't true!" "What wasn't?" She was keeping her voice carefully casual; this miserable contrition of Nick's was tugging at her rather too powerfully for complete safety. "What I remembered. What I saw just now." "You hoped it wasn't true?" she queried in surprise. "But you did it." "_I_ did it, Pat? Do you think _I_ could have done it?" "But you did!" Her voice had taken on a chill inflection; the memory of those indignities came to steel her against him. "Pat, do you think I could assault your daintiness, or maltreat the beauty I worship? Didn't anything occur to you? Didn't anything seem queer about--about that ghastly evening?" "Queer!" she echoed. "That's certainly a mild word to use, isn't it?" "But I mean--hadn't you any idea of what had happened? Didn't you think anything of it except that I had suddenly gone mad? Or that I'd grown to hate you?" "What was I to think?" she countered, trying to control the tremor that had crept into her voice. "But did you think that?" "No," the girl confessed after a pause. "At first, when you started with that drink, I thought you were looking for material for your work. That's what you said--an experiment. Didn't you?" "I guess so," he groaned. "But after that, after I'd swallowed that horrible stuff, but before everything went hazy, I--thought differently." "But what, Pat? What did you think?" "Why, then I realized that it wasn't you--not the real you. I could feel the--well, the presence of the person I knew; this presence that was tormenting me was another person, a terrible, cold, inhuman stranger." "Pat!" There was a note almost of relief in his voice. "Did you really feel that?" "Yes. Does it help matters, my sensing that? I can't see how." His eyes, which had been fixed on hers, dropped suddenly. "No," he muttered, all the relief gone out of his tones, "no, it doesn't help, does it? Except that it's a meager consolation to me to know that you felt it."