become strong enough to sit up for several hours and even to walk about her room. With so much vitality regained, of course she had become able to converse with him; yet so far she had confided to him almost nothing about her past or about her previous feelings for him. When the time came when she had been at last allowed to see him, and he had dared to clasp her and look into her eyes; when her hands had pressed his face, and his lips kissed her cheek, and she had brought her lips about to his while she gazed at him, that wonderful epoch of brief minutes had been mute but for the breathing of names, endearments and prayers of thankfulness. And their next visit, after a long interval, had been similarly silent.
Barney came to realize that this was not solely because of her hard necessity to spare herself the exhaustion of the great emotion sure to sweep her if she recounted her life; for another and more controlling reason she forbade herself.
"You shall hear all—all," she promised him, when she clasped him, "all in its proper time, my son. If I told you now, I would spend too much—too much of what I've kept within me for twenty years." And he understood that she did not mean solely her strength. "But it is almost time!"
The time, he knew, when at last she could requite the enemy of all her life; and as she felt the approach of her moment, she disciplined herself and him with pitiless sternness. As though she feared that recollection, like a spark, might suddenly fire her into vain and wasted outbursts of passion, she avoided all reference to what had happened and spoke with Barney only of what was to come.
In their future, he was to be her known and honored
