Page:The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan, 1922).djvu/470

 "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, had 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 428