But the slow days multiplied into weeks; and still he did not come; and the scanty news from Kashmir was not hopeful enough to be passed on to her--yet. Then, as she grew stronger, and more openly bewildered at the silence and delay, Desmond decided to speak to her himself. And while the tale was still upon his lips, while Quita sat listening to it, white and tearless, his hand grasping her own, a merciful fate brought her an envelope quaveringly addressed in pencil, containing word of definite progress at last, and an assurance that once he could set foot to ground nothing should hold him back. Ten days later the message, "Starting this morning," flashed through space to Dera Ishmael from Kashmir; and after that each hour brought him nearer. A second flash from Lahore; a third from Jhung; and Desmond, sending on a spare horse, rode down to the Indus to meet his friend, in Oriental fashion, 'at the edge of the carpet.' It was a gaunt, weather-beaten figure of a man that stepped out of the ferry-boat and grasped his hand; but there was that in his bearing and in his unshadowed eyes that told Desmond the chief of what he wished to know. For the rest, the greeting between them was of their race and kind. "Well, old chap, how are you?" "Deuced glad to see you back again." "And--Quita?" "Deuced glad also, I suspect." "Uncommonly kind of you both keeping her all this while." "Kind? It's been a privilege seeing so much of her. We shall grudge giving her up." And Desmond bestowed a reflective glance on the man who guessed nothing of the revelation in store for him. Their talk riding back to the station was fitful and fragmentary. All that remained to be said--and there was a good deal of it--would come out bit by bit, at odd moments, mainly under the influence of tobacco. In the meantime, their mutual satisfaction went deeper than speech; and it was enough. At the drawing-room door they parted. "You'll find all you need in there, I think," Desmond said, on a note of profound understanding; and Lenox, putting a strong hand upon himself, pushed aside the heavy curtain and stood, at last, before his wife. With a low cry, and arms outflung, she came to him; and that first rapture of reunion, of the heart's passionate upheaval and revealing--the more intense for the muteness of it--was a rapture sacred to themselves alone; not to be pried upon or set down. Such moments--come they but once in a lifetime, to one among a hundred--are God's reiterate answers to the problem of creation. The man or woman who has passed that way will never ask the soul's most withering question: To what end was I born? 'The rest may reason and welcome.' They are of the few who know.