spring to him with real warmth of gladness, and cry, 'It
is you! All is well.

'Blessedly well, _ma mie_, my sweetheart,' he said, throwing his arm
round her, and she rested against him murmuring, 'Now I feel it! Thou
are thyself!' They were in the dark cloister passage, and when he would
have moved forward she clung closer to him, and murmured, 'Oh, wait,
wait, yet an instant--thus I can feel that I have thee--the same--my
own!'

'My poor darling,' said Berenger, after a second, 'you must learn to
bear with both my looks and speech, though I be but a sorry shattered
fellow for you.'

'No, no,' she cried, hanging on him with double fervour. 'No, I am
loving you the more already,--doubly--trebly--a thousand times. Only
those moments were so precious, they made all these long years as
nothing. But come to the little one, and to your brother.'

The little one had already heard them, and was starting forward to meet
them, though daunted for a moment by the sight of the strange father:
she stood on the pavement, in the full flood of the moonlight from the
east window, which whitened her fair face, flaxen hair, and gray dress,
so that she did truly look like some spirit woven of the moonbeams.
Eustacie gave a cry of satisfaction: 'Ah! good, good; it was by
moonlight that I saw her first!'

Berenger took her in his arm, and held her to his breast with a sense of
insatiable love, while Philip exclaimed, 'Ay, well may you make much of
her, brother. Well might you seek them far and wide. Such treasures are
not to be found in the wide world.'

Berenger without answering, carried the little one to the step of the
ruined high altar, and there knelt, holding Eustacie by the hand, the
child in one arm, and, with the moon glancing on his high white brow
and earnest face, he spoke a few words of solemn thanks and prayer for
a blessing on their reunion, and the babe so wonderfully preserved to
them.

Not till then did he carry her into the lamplight by Philip's bed, and
scan therein every feature, to satisfy his eyes with the fulfilled hope
that had borne him through those darkest days, when, despairing of the
mother, the thought of the child had still sustained him to throw
his will into the balance of the scale between life and death. Little
Berangere gazed up into his face silently, with wondering, grave,
and somewhat sleepy eyes, and then he saw them fix themselves on his
powder-grimed and blood-stained hands. 'Ah! little he