And in the darkness, as would happen, the old love came back to mock her. Oh, why, _why_? had she not kept the love that was hers? Why had she not fought that dark woman for it? She had meanly run away, because it was not good enough, because it was not perfect. Because she had found a flaw in it she had thrown away her jewel. Now it was given her, for punishment, to know how good that love had been. The touch of Jimmie's clumsy hands as he had tucked her into her hammock at night burned her now with the maddening sweetness of a lost dream. The nights when she had watched over him, the pride and the swelling love of seeing rugged health come back to him, the memories of brave, struggling, laughing walks by his side through wind and snow, all these and a thousand dear, intimate memories came to haunt her with the mocking difference between a warm, happy human love, and the empty dream that she had made for herself. But she did not go down under despair. Jimmie was gone. She would never be near him again. She did not say it. But she had no strength to deny it. She was dumb. She was defeated. There was nothing to live for, and, apparently, nothing to die for. But her heart held on, beaten, unhoping, but living. And today, not an hour ago, a wonderful thing had happened. A miracle had stolen upon her unawares. She could not now say just where she was or what she was doing at the time. She had heard nothing, seen nothing. But she found that she was suddenly, and unaccountably, certain that Jimmie was not dead. She did not try to think what might have brought this intelligence to her. Perhaps he had come back to consciousness and his heart had answered her. She did not care. She did not want to think. Her dream had sprung back to life again and was once more carrying her, happy but still trembling and fearful, up again through the heights from which she had fallen. She had told the doctor the exact truth. It was not anything that she had seen or heard. But she _knew_ that somehow a message had come to her heart from Jimmie. God had not mocked her faith. She _knew_. And she waited. It was a long, long summer afternoon through which she worked and waited, her spirit quivering to the sense of a great wonder hovering near at hand. She did not feel or recognize any premonition that Wardwell was physically near her. She had schooled herself well since those terrible early days, back in the base hospital, when she had fearfully crept near to and studied every long bundle of a broken man that was brought in, praying that it might be, and that it might not be, Jimmie. She did not do those things now, for she had learned the heavy cost of them upon her strength and her nerves. And now, too, she was still living upon that sight of Jimmie lying out in the open at the foot of a bank, and, curiously, she did not think of him as having been moved from there.