Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny.

Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.
As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman--listening, waiting, judging.

She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.
Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged.

Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness.

As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together--with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.
Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home.