Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/350

 spoke, and it was the old tone, but with a richer, mellower trill than he had ever heard before. She was there; and she was more exquisite than ever and—he loved her more devotedly, more passionately, than he had ever loved her.

"You have come home," he cried with a choke in his voice, with eagerness consuming him, but still holding off, for his soul had learned its discipline.

"To you," she said simply, and opened her arms.

The long wait was over!

With a sigh of ecstasy that was pain, he folded her to his breast for the longest, the tenderest, the slowest embrace that he had ever given, each moment of which was rapture beyond rapture.

George Junior gazed at his father and mother strangely for an interval, and then, as if awed by some emotion beyond his power to comprehend, he backed out of the room and sought the absorbing concerns of childhood elsewhere.

As for the reunited lovers, nothing and nobody existed but themselves, and in the minds of each a thousand thoughts, reflections, queries, explanations, impulses, and resolutions were forming and demanding expression. Each knew instinctively that this embrace marked the end of wanderings, of discontents, of misunderstandings and separations; that at last two lives were fused, and each wanted to give the other bonds to that