"I have some news for you."

The round, smiling face of Eddy Meredith that refused to change with age, beamed at Anna.

"Erik's back."

The beam hesitated.

"He wrote. He's coming to see me."

"Anna...."

"Yes, dear, I know. It sort of frightens me, too. But," she laughed quietly, "there is nothing to be frightened about. He didn't give any address or I would have written him telling him."

"He must know you're divorced," Meredith spoke nervously.

"I don't know if he does, Eddy."

She reached her hand out and placed it over his, her eyes glancing at the figure of Isaac Dorn. He was asleep in a chair.

"Please, dearest, don't worry," she whispered.

"It'll be hard for you."

Meredith's face acquired an abnormal expression.

"Maybe you'll feel different." He sighed, and Anna shook her head.

"When's he coming?"

"To-morrow night."

"Did he say anything in the letter?"

She stood up and went to a desk.

"Here it is." A smile touched her lips. "He always wrote curious letters. Words and words when there was nothing to say. And a single phrase when there was something." She read from a sheet of paper--"'Dear Anna, I am coming home. Erik.'"

In the corner Isaac Dorn opened his watery eyes and stared at the ceiling.

"Are you awake, father?"

"Yes, Anna."

"Did I tell you I'd heard from Erik?"

The old man mumbled in his beard.

"He'll be out to-morrow night," she said, smiling at him. He nodded his head, stared at her, and seemed to doze off again.

"Father is failing," Anna whispered. Meredith had arisen. His face had grown blank. He walked toward the hall, saying, "I'll go now."

Anna came quickly to him. Her hands reached his shoulders and she stood regarding him intently.

"There's nothing any more, dear. It all ended long ago. Perhaps I'll be sad when I see him. But sad only for him."

Meredith smiled and spoke with an effort at lightness.

"Remember, I don't hold you to anything. I want you only to be happy. In your own way. Not in my way. And if it will mean happiness for you to ... for you to go back, why ..." He shrugged his shoulders and continued to smile with hurt eyes.

"Eddy...." Her face came close to his. He hesitated until her arms closed tightly around him. He felt her warm lips cling and open.

"You've never kissed like that before, Anna." There was almost a fear in his voice.

"Because I never knew I wanted you," she whispered, "till now--till this minute; till you said about my going back."

Her face was alive with emotion. A laugh, and she was in his arms again.

They stood embraced, murmuring tenderly to each other.

Later in her bedroom Anna undressed slowly. Her thoughts seemed to be quarreling with her emotions, her emotions with her thoughts. This was Erik's room--ancient torture chamber. Something still clinging to its walls and furniture. Ah, nights of agony still in the air she breathed.

Her words formed themselves quietly. They came to peer into her heart--polite visitors standing on tiptoe before a closed cell that hid something.

"Is there anything?" she murmured. "No. I'm different."

She thought of the day she had come out of a grave and resumed living.

It had seemed as if she must learn to walk again, to breathe, to discover anew the meanings of words. At first--listless, uncertain. Then new steps, new meanings. Her mind moved back through the year. She had wept only once--on the night of the divorce. But that was as one weeps at an old grave, even a stranger's grave. The rest had been Eddy.

"I've changed. And I've been happier in many ways."

She was talking to herself. Why? "I'm a different Anna." But why think of it? It was settled.

She lay in the bed and her eyes opened at the darkness. Here was where she had lain when she had died. Each night, new deaths. Here the lonely darkness that had once choked her, torn at her eyes and made her scream aloud with pain. Things on the other side of a grave. Memories become alien. Things of long ago, when the whisper of the dark came like an insanity into her brain. "Erik gone! Erik gone! Gone!" A word that beat at her until she died--to awake in the morning and stumble once more through a day.

Now she regarded the dark quietly. Black. It had no shape. It lay everywhere about her. But it did not burn nor choke. A peaceful, harmless dark that could only whisper as if it were asking something.

What was it asking? Long arms of night reaching out for something. But there was nothing to give, even if she wanted to. Not even tears.

Nothing to give, even though it whispered for alms. Whispered, "Erik ...

Erik!" But there was no little memory. No big memory. Dead. Torn out of her. So the dark whispered to a dead thing in her that did not stir. A smile like a tired little gesture pa.s.sed over her. "Poor Erik, poor Erik!" she murmured. "He must be thinking things that are no more."

She grew chill for an instant.... The memory of agonies, of the screams her love had uttered as it died.

"Poor Erik!"

She buried her cool cheek restlessly in the pillow.

CHAPTER IV

Everything the same as it had been. As if he had stepped out of the office for a walk around the block and come back. But a sameness that had lost its familiarity. Old furniture, old faces, intensely a part of his consciousness, yet grown strange. It was like forgetting suddenly the name of a life-long friend.