But Chester is not the man for dreams when his sweetheart is within hug of him. He only pauses to think how he can avert the shock of letting her see a dead man live before her. “She’ll think me a ghost and uncanny,” he meditates; for ghosts, fairies and the supernatural were very common in those days. As he stands hesitating the girl picks up a prayer book that is near her hand and forces herself to read, then sighing puts it down. As she moves a gleam from her white hand comes to him. It is from the ring he gave her, and Guy can be silent no more. “Joy never kills, otherwise I were dead of it now myself,” he thinks; then says lightly, almost in her ear: “Doña Hermoine, why don’t you cry me welcome?” “Holy Virgin! that voice,” falters the girl. “That VOICE!” Starting up and her eye catching him, she gasps: “Madre mia! Guido! My Guido, who is dead!” next whispers with white lips: “Your spirit has not come to reproach me—you cannot do that, when I wed only heaven because you’re dead!” And her lovely eyes beam with horror of the supernatural. “Not dead, but on the sick leave! They don’t give sick leave to dead men.” Then thinking to destroy the supernatural with the commonplace, Guy suggests: “Are you not going to ask me to dinner?” “A dinner for a ghost!” This is a wild shrieking gasp from Hermoine’s pale lips, as seizing her prayer book and holding on high the gilded cross upon its vellum cover, she begins falteringly: “Exorcizare te—” But he cries out: “No GHOST! Don’t exorcise me as weird!” “No ghost? Impossible! I have mourned for you—ever since—the awful news—of the Battle-on-the-Ice—when that cruel English cut-throat and his men killed—” “Not ME! Though they slashed me up a little here and there—a cut upon the head, and a bullet in the body. I’ll prove I am not dead. Are these ghost lips? Don’t you remember them?” As Hermoine half reels Guy gets an arm about her graceful waist and stops her gasps and sighs as such hysteria should be always stayed in lovely woman. Perhaps it is the vivid life that is in his kisses that makes the girl—though it takes many of them to convince her—suddenly gasp: “Alive! Yes, yes! you are alive! your heart beats against mine. My Guido lives!” and bursts out sobbing, as if grief had come to her instead of joy. But she has ready and effectual comforter and soon her tears become smiles, her sighs become love notes, she beams upon the dead that is alive, like the sun itself, brighter, for the cloud it bursts through. As for Guy, he makes up for enforced absence and lost time in a way that makes Miss Alva blush and beam, then blush again and murmur: “You—you need not prove to me so often that you live. I know your lips are not ghost lips.” Here she murmurs reproachfully: “And you let me mourn for you so long?” “A prisoner—” begins Chester. “A prisoner!—they take no prisoners!” “The First of the English does! Besides my wounds,” mutters Guy, disconcerted.