Sir Adrian staggered back, fell on his knees and clapped his hands together with an agonised cry: "Cécile...!" [53] [53] CHAPTER VI THE WHEEL OF TIME And to his eye There was but one beloved face on earth, And that was shining on him. Byron. Upon the threshold she stood, looking in upon him with dark, luminous eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in its mud-stained stocking. Sir Adrian stared up at her, his brain whirling with a frenzy of joy, gripped in its soaring ecstasy by terror of the incomprehensible. On the wings of the storm and the wind had she come to him, his love—across the awful barriers that divide life and death? Had his longings and the clamour of his desolate soul reached her, after all these years, in the far-beyond, and was her sweet ghost here to bid him cease from them and let her lie at rest? Or, yet, had she come to call him from the weary world that their souls might meet and be one at last?... Then let her but lay her lips against his, as once in the bitterness of death, that his sorely-tried heart may break with the exquisite pang and he, too, may die upon their kiss. Swift such thoughts were tossing in the turmoil of his mind when the vision smiled ... a young, rosy, living smile; and then reason, memory, the wonder of
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