Part 55 (2/2)

”Marion!” he cried, and leaped to catch her, and folded her close, as he had clasped her in the cave. But now the arms that stole up around his neck did not fall away weakly as before, but tightened, and held him.

A long time they remained thus, in a silence broken only by the crackling of the flames, which they did not hear, and the wind rising outside the cottage, for which they did not care. At length he put his fingers under her chin, and raised her head so that he could look into her eyes.

”I believe it now!” he said.

”It's true!” she answered, so low that he scarcely heard it.

”I love you!”

”I've loved you always!”

Then even in her joy the recollection of all that she had come through to this moment brought back that quivering of her chin, which had become only too familiar to him in days past. His head sank toward her, and their lips met.

After a while he led her back to her chair, and knelt down to look up at her. For there were other difficulties. He had nothing to give her, he said; neither riches nor family nor honor nor any future of which he could be a.s.sured. She stopped him, with a hand laid gently on his lips. He held it there, kissing it. How it had toiled and hurt for him, that little hand, still rough and scarred!

”Can you ever forgive me?” he pleaded.

”There's nothing to forgive, Philip. You did not understand.”

”There! You're treating me like a child again!” he protested, smiling contentedly.

”And once you scolded me dreadfully for that!”

”But you were right. I've been a child; for ten years I've been a child that thought it was a man.”

She did not reply to that, fearing to wound him. So another golden silence fell between them, while he held her hands, stroking the hard, cracked skin of them. After a while he brought a chair, and sat close by her side, and told her all that had been left untold,--about his boyhood, his ambitions, his ignorance and innocence, his work in Paris and the future it seemed to hold for him; and then the girl on the Seine boat, and what he saw one night in her apartment, and his despair; his father's death, and the wanderings that followed; and how the shy and introspective boy had become in one day a man of violence and desperation, his heart full of hatred and bitterness.

”And so I thought, Marion, that you were all alike; not alike in all things, but the virtuous more dangerous than the vicious, because more calculating and cold. You even--I thought you were the most dangerous of all. I knew you were good, but I said your goodness was only another form of selfishness, that you had been reared in luxury, and taught to expect as your right many things you had never earned and never could earn or deserve. I said--Wait, dear--I said that the man who should marry you would be nothing but a beast of burden, a slave.

It was so difficult to believe you could be content with--”

”With love!” she whispered.

”But _can_ you?” he demanded, a ghost of the old incredulity rising in spite of all.

”I haven't told you about Robert,” she said softly. ”He has wealth, and will have much more. He loves me. He offered me all, to do with it as I wished. I've known him all my life--almost. He's good too, poor Robert! But that day, after you'd told me that I must go back to New York at once, I--”

”Marion!” Haig cried.

”No, listen! I told him that day that I could never marry him. He couldn't understand--like you, Philip. He thought--dear Robert!--he thought that money--I know it's what they want most--so many women.

But, Philip, dear heart! Don't you know that if a woman really loves there's nothing she won't do--on her hands and knees--to the end of the world? And if she has love, what else is there--that matters?”

”I didn't know,” he answered, ”and I couldn't have believed it until--that day in the cave, when you fell ill.”

He told her then of the revelation that had come to him, and how he had taken her in his arms, in a fury of love and despair.

”But I thought it was a dream!” she murmured.

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