ders, and cried: "It was for you I would have
done this, and now for your sake I will not do it;" and rushing past
her, he ran downstairs.

She remained where she was. His last words had thrilled to her very
marrow, and a sudden tide of gladness broke over that timid doubting
heart of hers. She sat down on the portmanteau trembling all over. "It
was for you! for you!"--the words echoed in her ear. She half dreaded
his return; if he should not mean what she thought! and how could he
mean it?--What was she to him?

She heard him coming upstairs again; in her agitation she rose, and
would have left the room, but he met her at the door, and taking her in
his arms, he told her all.

"It was I who was blind," he cried, "and you who saw--who saw
prophetically. Without you, where should I have been now?--An orphan
without a future, without a home; banished from the only hearts I love,
and by my own miserable delusions. And now--now they are all my own
again; mine and more than I ever believed to be mine--more than I could
have trusted myself to possess."

She hung upon his neck in mute devotion; mute for very scorn of the
poverty of language. The long repressed fervour of her affection had
broken loose, and burned in her silent kiss.

Day dawned upon their happiness. Now he knew what she had so
obstinately concealed, and what this very room had witnessed; where
now, pledged to each other for life, with a grasp of each other's
hands, they parted in the early morning.

In the course of the day a letter came from Wolf, written the night
before, from the nearest village. Clement might be at rest, he wrote;
he retracted everything; he knew best that what he had said was
nonsense. He had spoken in anger and in wine.

It had provoked him to see Clement going about so indifferent and
cool, when, with a word, he might have taken possession of such a
treasure--and when he saw that Clement really did mean to do so, he had
reviled what had been denied to him.

He begged Clement not to think worse of him than he deserved, and to
make his excuses to the young girl and to his parents; and not to break
with him entirely, and for ever.

When Clement read this to Marlene, she was rather touched: "I can be
sorry for him now," she said; "though I always felt uneasy when he was
here--and how much he might have spared us both, and spared himself!
But I can think of him with charity now--we have so much to thank him
for!"--