A New Pretender

A sudden wave of delight, a sudden rush of blood through his veins,
swept before it and away for that time all memory of his struggle and
his resolution to renounce her. All that was left was the irresistible
storm of impulse upon his reserve and his self-control.

When she recognized him, she started violently, smote her hands
together and gazed at him with such overweening joy written on her
face, that he would have swept her into his arms, but for her quick
recovery and retreat. In shelter behind the exedra she halted, fended
from him by the marble seat. He gazed across its back at her with all
the love of his determined soul shining in his eyes.

"You! You!" she cried.

"But you!" he cried back at her across the exedra.

The preposterousness of their greetings appealed to them at that
moment and they both laughed. He started around the exedra; she moved
away.

"Stay!" he begged. "I want only to touch--your hand."

Shyly, she let him take both of her hands, and he lifted them in spite
of her little show of resistance and kissed them.

"We might have saved ourselves farewells and journeyed together," he
said blithely.

"But I thought you had gone back to Ephesus," she said.

"What! After you had told me you were going to Jerusalem? No. I have
been nursing a knife wound in a sheep hovel in the hills since an hour
after I saw you last."

Her lips parted and her face grew grave, deeply compassionate and
grieved. If there remained any weakness in his frame before that
moment, the spell of her pity enchanted him to strength again. He
found himself searching for words to describe his pain, that he might
elicit more of that curative sweet.