nowing what I know now I would go on with that until he has made
his peace with his family? Before, it was different. I thought him alone
and ill-treated and hunted down. I could help him then, comfort him. Now
I should be--all you ever thought me if I did not send him to his
grandfather." She smiled again a little mirthlessly. "If his love for me
is worth anything," she said, "he will come back--but openly this time,
not in hiding. Then I shall know that he is--what I would have him be.
Otherwise--"

Ste. Marie looked away.

"But you must remember, Coira," said he, "that the lad is very young and
that his family--they may try--it may be hard for him. They may say that
he is too young to know--Ah, child, I should have thought of this!"

"Ste. Marie," said the girl, and after a moment he turned to face her.
"What shall you say to Arthur's family, Ste. Marie," she demanded, very
soberly, "when they ask you if I--if Arthur should be allowed to--come
back to me?"

A wave of color flooded the man's face and his eyes shone. He cried:

"I shall tell them, Coira, that if that wretched, half-baked lad should
search this wide world round, from Paris on to Paris again, and if he
should spend a lifetime searching, he would never find the beauty and
the sweetness and the tenderness and the true faith that he left behind
at La Lierre--nor the hundredth part of them. I should say that you are
so much above him that he ought to creep to you on his knees from the
rue de l'Universite to this garden, thanking God that you were here at
the journey's end, and kissing the ground that he dragged himself over
for sheer joy and gratitude. I should tell them--Oh, I have no words! I
could tell them so pitifully little of you! I think I should only say,
'Go to her and see!' I think I should just say that."

The girl turned her head away with a little sob. But afterward she faced
him once more, and she looked up to him with sweet, half-shut eyes for a
long time. At last she said:

"For love of whom, Ste. Marie, did you undertake this quest--this search
for Arthur Benham? It was not in idleness or by way of a whim. It was
for love. For love of whom?"

For some strange and inexplicable reason the words struck him like a
blow and he stared whitely.

"I came," he said, at last, and his voice was oddly flat, "for his
sister's sake. For love of her."

Coira O'Hara dropped her eyes. But presently she looked up again with a
smile. She said, "Go