rested a moment, in her anxiety to warn him of his danger.
"Oh, no," she said, lifting her eyes frankly to his: "oh, no, Monsieur!
It is not that. There is mystery about you!" She felt her heart beating
hard. It almost choked her, but she kept on bravely. "People say strange
and bad things about you. No one knows"--she trembled under the painful
inquiry of his eyes. Then she gained courage and went on, for she must
make it clear she trusted him, that she took him at his word, before she
told him of the peril before him--"No one knows where you came from...
and it is nobody's business. Some people do not believe in you. But I
believe in you--I should believe in you if every one doubted; for there
is no feeling in me that says, 'He has done some wicked thing
that stands-between us.' It isn't the same as with Portugais, you
see--naturally, it could not be the same."

She seemed not to realise that she was telling more of her own heart
than she had ever told. It was a revelation, having its origin in an
honesty which impelled a pure outspokenness to himself. Reserve, of
course, there had been elsewhere, for did not she hold a secret with
him? Had she not hidden things, equivocated else where? Yet it had been
at his wish, to protect the name of a dead man, for the repose of whose
soul masses were now said, with expensive candles burning. For this she
had no repentance; she was without logic where this man's good was at
stake.

Charley had before him a problem, which he now knew he never could evade
in the future. He could solve it by none of the old intellectual means,
but by the use of new faculties, slowly emerging from the unexplored
fastnesses of his nature.

"Why should you believe in me?" he asked, forcing himself to smile, yet
acutely alive to the fact that a crisis was impending. "You, like all
down there in Chaudiere, know nothing of my past, are not sure that I
haven't been a hundred times worse than you think poor Jo there. I may
have been anything. You may be harbouring a man the law is tracking
down."

In all that befell Rosalie Evanturel thereafter, never could come such
another great resolute moment. There was nothing to support her in the
crisis but her own faith. It needed high courage to tell this man who
had first given her dreams, then imagination, hope, and the beauty of
doing for another's well-being rather than for her own--to tell this man
that he was a suspected criminal. Would he hate her? Would