After a moment she came slowly towards me, and by the light that came from the room I looked into her eyes. Then with a great cry I fell at her feet, feeling that I held in mine warm hands of flesh and blood. "Barbara!" "I've come back--my dear--my dear--to save my child," said the voice of the Barbara I had loved and lost twenty years before. Inside the lighted room the man whose name she bore started, and shook himself, and fell asleep again; outside in the cold and the darkness I knelt at the feet of the woman I loved, and bowed my face upon her hands, as I had done twenty years before in the same spot. CHAPTER VII NEWS OF THE PRISONER In some unreal dream, as it seemed, I presently found myself walking through the ruined garden in the darkness, with that shadowy figure of the woman I had loved beside me. It was a shadowy figure then, because there seemed to be nothing tangible about her; I should scarcely have been surprised if she had suddenly melted again into the shadows of the garden, and been lost to me. I found myself, broken trembling creature that I was, walking beside her fearfully, and seizing an opportunity now and then to touch her dress or her hand, to be sure that I was not dreaming. And presently it happened, happily and naturally enough, that we walked out of the place under the winter moonlight hand in hand. I would not have you laugh at us; I would not have you think that we were old. True, I was old, in the sense that I was broken and forlorn and poor, with no one in the world to cling to, except this dear woman who had so mysteriously come back to me. So intangible had been my dreams of her at all times, that there was less of a shock to me in finding her grown older than I should have thought possible. I had pictured her always, first as being of the age I had known her as a girl, and later as having died young, and never having grown to womanhood at all. But now, as she walked beside me, I found, when I had the courage to steal a glance at her now and then, that she had the eyes of the Barbara of old, and that the face, though changed and strengthened, was only the face of the Barbara I had loved in all its lines and in all its maturer beauty. It seemed fitting, too, that we should meet like this, with the night and the silence to ourselves; fitting that we should turn naturally towards that wood in which we had met, and presently sit down there, side by side, on a fallen tree to talk. Such poor forlorn lovers we were, that I remember regretting I had no overcoat that I could put about her; and she laughing, in the way I remembered so well, and telling me that it did not matter. My head was bare after my escape from the house by the window; I remember that she touched my grey hair softly with her hand for a moment before she began to speak.