redible that he could ever have believed ill of her--ever have
doubted her honesty. It seemed to him so incredible that he could have
laughed aloud in bitterness and self-disdain. But as he looked at the
girl's white face and her shadowy, wondering eyes, all laughter, all
bitterness, all cruel misunderstandings were swallowed up in the golden
light of his joy at knowing her, in the end, for what she was.

"Coira! Coira!" he cried, and neither of the two knew that he called her
for the first time by her name. "Oh, child," said he, "how they have
lied to you and tricked you! I might have known, I might have seen it,
but I was a blind fool. I thought--intolerable things. I might have
known. They have lied to you most damnably, Coira."

She stared at him in a breathless silence without movement of any sort.
Only her face seemed to have turned a little whiter and her great eyes
darker, so that they looked almost black and enormous in that still
face.

He told her, briefly, the truth: how young Arthur had had frequent
quarrels with his grandfather over his waste of money, how after one of
them, not at all unlike the others, he had disappeared, and how Captain
Stewart, in desperate need, had set afoot his plot to get the lad's
greater inheritance for himself. He described for her old David Stewart
and the man's bitter grief, and he told her about the will, about how he
had begun to suspect Captain Stewart, and of how he had traced the lost
boy to La Lierre. He told her all that he knew of the whole matter, and
he knew almost all there was to know, and he did not spare himself even
his misconception of the part she had played, though he softened that as
best he could.

Midway of his story Mlle. O'Hara bent her head and covered her face with
her hands. She did not cry out or protest or speak at all. She made no
more than that one movement, and after it she stood quite still, but the
sight of her, bowed and shamed, stripped of pride, as it had been of
garments, was more than the man could bear.

He cried her name, "Coira!" And when she did not look up, he called once
more upon her. He said: "Coira, I cannot bear to see you stand so. Look
at me. Ah, child, look at me! Can you realize," he cried--"can you even
begin to think what a great joy it is to me to know at last that you
have had no part in all this? Can't you see what it means to me? I can
think of nothing else. Coira, look up!"

She raised her white face, and there w