Page:The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/68

60 ripe bloom, the fine irregularity of her features. To put his finger on the identity would make him feel better. Some of the facts of the girl's crooked face were still there—conventional beauty was absent; but the proportions and relations had changed, and the expression and the spirit; she had accepted herself or ceased to care—had found oblivion and activity and appreciation. What Maurice mainly discovered, however, in this intenser observation was an attitude of hospitality towards himself which immediately effaced the presumption of "triumph." Vulgar vanity was far from her, and the grossness of watching her effect upoji him; she was watching only the lost vision that had come back, the joy that, if for a single hour, she had found again. She herself had no measure of the alteration that struck him, and there was no substitution for her in the face that her deep eyes seemed to brush with their hovering. Presently they were talking like old friends, and before long each was in possession of the principal facts concerning the other. Many things had come and gone, and the