He lay an instant taking it in--as if he wished to be quite reasonable. "At the same moment?" "Yes--in my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you." At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. "_He_ didn't come to me." "You came to yourself," she beautifully smiled. "Ah I've come to myself now--thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face--this brute's a black stranger. He's none of _me_, even as I _might_ have been," Brydon sturdily declared. But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. "Isn't the whole point that you'd have been different?" He almost scowled for it. "As different as _that_--?" Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. "Haven't you exactly wanted to know _how_ different? So this morning," she said, "you appeared to me." "Like _him_?" "A black stranger!" "Then how did you know it was I?" "Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so over what you might, what you mightn't have been--to show you, you see, how I've thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me--that my wonder might be answered. So I knew," she went on; "and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had--and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. _He_ seemed to tell me of that. So why," she strangely smiled, "shouldn't I like him?" It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. "You 'like' that horror--?" "I _could_ have liked him. And to me," she said, "he was no horror. I had accepted him." "'Accepted'--?" Brydon oddly sounded. "Before, for the interest of his difference--yes. And as _I_ didn't disown him, as _I_ knew him--which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn't, my dear,--well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him." She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand--still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, "You 'pitied' him?" he grudgingly, resentfully asked. "He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged," she said. "And haven't I been unhappy? Am not I--you've only to look at me!--ravaged?" "Ah I don't say I like him _better_," she granted after a thought. "But he's grim, he's worn--and things have happened to him. He doesn't make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle." "No"--it struck Brydon; "I couldn't have sported mine 'down-town.' They'd have guyed me there."