It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled--those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other--faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty.
Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.
Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp--the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands.

There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment.

Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.
They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot.
Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one.

And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her.

The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence.