He started at that voice, started and paused, holding back as it were on
the very verge of the precipice. So she was there indeed! He could hear
her sobbing breath. There came to him the consciousness of her hands
clasping his, and the faintest, vaguest glow went through his ice-cold
body. He tried, piteously weak as he was, to bend his fingers about
hers.

And then there came the warmth of her lips upon them, kissing them with
a fierce passion of tenderness, drawing them close as if to breathe her
own vitality into his failing pulses.

"Open your eyes to me, darling!" she besought him. "See how I love you!
And see how I want your love! I can't do without it, Billikins. It's my
only safeguard. What! He is dead? I say he is not--he is not! Or if he
is, he shall rise again. He shall come back. See! He is looking at me!
How dare you say he is dead?"

The wild anguish of her voice reached him, pierced him, rousing him as
no other power on earth could have roused him. Out of that deathly
inertia he drew himself, inch by inch, as out of some clinging swamp.
His hand found strength to tighten upon hers. He opened his eyes,
leaden-lidded as they were, and saw her face all white and drawn, gazing
into his own with such an agony of love, such a consuming fire of
worship, that it seemed as if his whole being were drawn by it, warmed,
comforted, revived.

She hung above him, fierce in her devotion, driving back the destroyer
by the sheer burning intensity of her love. "You shan't die, Billikins!"
she told him, passionately. "You can't die--now I am here!"