shall
learn to see through my eyes--to hear through my ears--to remember all
that he has forgotten!..." Her voice broke in a half sob. Morgana put
an arm about her.

"Manella, Manella!" she said--"You do not know what you say--you cannot
understand the responsibility--it would make you a prisoner for life--"

"Oh, I understand!" and Manella shook back her dark hair with the
little proud, decisive gesture characteristic of her
temperament--"Yes!--and I wish to be so imprisoned! If we had not been
rescued by you, we should have died together!--now you will help us to
live together! Will you not? You are a little white angel--a
fairy!--yes!--to me you are!--your heart is full of unspent love! You
will let me stay with him always--always?--As his nurse?--his
servant?--his slave?"

Morgana looked at her tenderly, touched to the quick by her eagerness
and her beauty, now intensified by the glow of excitement which gave a
roseate warmth to her cheeks and deeper darkness to her eyes. All
ignorant and unsuspecting as she was of the world's malignity and cruel
misjudgments, how could it be explained to her that a woman of such
youth and loveliness, electing to dwell alone with a man, even if the
man were a hopeless paralytic, would make herself the subject of
malicious comment and pitiless scandal! Some reflection of this feeling
showed itself in the expression of Morgana's face while she hesitated
to answer, holding the girl's hand in her own and stroking it
affectionately the while. Manella, gazing at her as a worshipper might
gaze at a sacred picture, instinctively divined her thought.

"Ah? I know what you would say!" she exclaimed, "That I might bring
shame to him by my companionship--always--yes!--that is
possible!--wicked people would talk of him and judge him wrongly--"

"Oh, Manella, dear!" murmured Morgana--"Not him--not him--but YOU!"

"Me?" She tossed back her wealth of hair, and smiled--"What am I? Just
a bit of dust in his path! I am nothing at all! I do not care what
anybody says or thinks of ME!--what should it matter! But see!--to save
HIM--let me be his wife!"

"His wife!" Morgana repeated the words in amazement, and Lady
Kingswood, laying down her work, gazed at the two beautiful women, the
one so spiritlike and fair, the other so human and queenly, in a kind
of stupefaction, wondering if she had heard aright.

"His wife! Yes!"... Manella spoke with a thrill of exultation in her
voice,--and she caug