ce.
I want to tell you how your keeping my secret made a different being of
me. If you had betrayed me to justice, I might have been now an inmate
of a prison cell. Margie Harrison, your silence saved me! Do me the
justice to credit my assertion, when I tell you that I did not enter my
grandfather's house because I cared for the plunder I should obtain. I
had taken a vow to be revenged on him for his cruelty to my parents, and
Sharp, the man who was with me, represented to me, that there was no
surer way of accomplishing my purpose than by taking away the treasures
that he prized. For that only I became a house-breaker. I deserved
punishment. I do not seek to palliate my guilt, but I thank you again
for saving me!"

"I could not do otherwise than remain silent. When I would have spoken
your name, something kept me from doing it. I think I remembered always
the pitiful face of the little street-sweeper, and I could not bear to
bring him any more suffering."

"Since those days, Miss Harrison, I have met you frequently--always
by accident--but to-night it is no accident. I came here on purpose.
For what, do you think?"

"I do not know--how should I?"

"I have come here to tell you what I longed to tell you years ago! what
was no less true then than it is now; what was true of me when I was a
street-sweeper, what has been true of me ever since, and what will be
true of me through time and eternity!"

He had drawn very near to her--his arm stole round her waist, and he sat
looking down into her face with his soul in his eyes.

"Margie, I love you! I have loved you since the first moment I saw you.
There has never been a shade of wavering; I have been true to you through
all. My first love will be my last. Your influence has kept me from the
lower depths of sin; the thought of you has been my salvation from ruin.
Margie, my darling! I love you! I love you!"

"And yet you kept silence all these years! Oh, Archer!"

"I could not do differently. You were as far above me as the evening star
is above the earth it shines upon! It would have been base presumption in
the poor saloon-waiter, or the dry-goods clerk, to have aspired to the
hand of one like you. And although I loved you so, I should never have
spoken, had not fate raised me to the position of a fortune equal to your
own, and given me the means of offering you a home worthy of you. But I
am waiting for my answer. Give it to me, Margie."

Her shy eyes met his, a