she was his!

"You!" he cried out--and strained her to him. "You!" he cried again--and
kissed her lips and her eyelids and her lips again.

And then her head was buried on his shoulder, and she was crying softly;
but after a moment she raised her hands and laid them upon his face,
and held them there, and because it was dark, dared to raise her head as
well, and her eyes to look into his.

Then for a long time they stood there so, and for a long time neither
spoke--and then with a little startled, broken cry, as though the peril
and the menace hanging over them, forgotten for the moment, were thrust
like a knife stab suddenly upon her, she drew herself away, and ran from
him, and went and got a lamp, and lighted it, and set it upon the table.

And Jimmie Dale, still standing there, watched her. How gloriously her
eyes shone, dimmed and misty with the tears that filled them though they
were! And there was nothing incongruous in the rags that clothed her, in
the squalour and poverty of the bare room, in the white furrows that the
tears had plowed through the grime and make-up on her cheeks.

"You wonderful, wonderful woman!" Jimmie Dale whispered.

She shook her head as though almost in self-reproach.

"I am not wonderful, Jimmie," she said, in a low voice. "I"--and then
she caught his arm, and her voice broke a little--"I've brought you into
this--probably to your death. Jimmie, tell me what happened last night,
and since then. I--I've thought at times to-day I should go mad. Oh,
Jimmie, there is so much to say to-night, so much to do if--if we
are ever to be together for--for always. Last night, Jimmie--the
telephone--I knew there was danger--that all had gone wrong--what was
it?"

His arms were around her shoulders, drawing her close to him again.

"I found the wires tapped," he said slowly.

"Yes, and--and the man you met--the chauffeur?"

"He is dead," Jimmie Dale answered gently.

He felt her hand close with a quick, spasmodic clutch upon his arm; her
face grew white--and for a moment she turned away her head.

"And--and the package?" she asked presently.

"I do not know," replied Jimmie Dale. "He did not have it with him;
he--"

"Wait!" she interrupted quickly. "We are only wasting time like this!
Tell me everything, everything just as it happened, everything from the
moment you received my letter."

And, holding her there in his arms, softening as best he could the more
brutal details, he told h