"I thought you were dead!" she was explaining to him. "You see, I thought they had killed you."
She had to touch him, so overpowering had been the terrors in which she imagined him dead; and when she did it, wholly regardless of the others, and when she found him warm and strong, he clasped her hand and held it, his pulses throbbing with hers. For though he could not comprehend what had happened, yet he was feeling only for her and with her; he had appreciated that somehow these others—her people—had been playing with her and tricking her, and that they had used him in their trick to take an advantage over her. He realized that, in doing this for themselves, they cruelly had won him an advantage of another sort over her, and he would not let her show this advantage without showing that she held similar advantage over him.
"I came to find you as early as I dared," he told her. "I came here just to see you. They told me you would be down soon. I had no idea you had gone out."
"I went to the Rock for you. You see, I thought they had hurt you and—"
Her grandfather interrupted them loudly; he ordered her to go at once to her room; but she disregarded him. A few minutes ago she stood against him when she felt herself solitary in her combat with him; then she had been willing alone to defy him for herself and for her father, who was dead, and for her new friend who had come to her from her father and whom—she had believed—they had killed. Now she had regained him; his strength and thought and will joined with hers again for the encounter which they would take up together. She, at least, much more fully comprehended
