"You know I didn't dream I was rich until I got here. The lawyer says they've advertised, but I've been away from everything most of the time--not looking out for advertisements. I can't understand the old gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a thoroughly decent chap." "Oh, hardly a reprobate!" "Worse, Nance--an ass--think of my talking to that dear old soul as I did--taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith. I shudder when I remember it. And yet I honestly thought he might be made to see things my way." Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of their last parting--that singular moment when they blindly groped for each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all time since--and increasingly during the later years--secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled--those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other--faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty. Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind. Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp--the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie. They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot. Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength. As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman--listening, waiting, judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.