ce then
when you were not more to me than any other woman in all the world."

A new light came into her face, the shadows left her eyes, and the
pallor fled from her lips. "You loved me?" she said in a voice grown
soft-husky still, but soft as the light in a summer heaven. "You loved
me--and have always loved me since we first met?"

Her look was so appealing, so passionate and so womanly, that he longed
to reach out his arms to her, and say, "Come--come home, Sheila," but
the situation did not permit that, and only his eyes told the story of
what was in his mind.

"I have always loved you, Sheila, and shall do so while I have breath
and life. I have always given you the best that is in me, tried to do
what was good for us both, since my misfortune--crime, Lord Mallow calls
it, as does the world. Never a sunrise that does not find you in the
forefront of all the lighted world; never a flower have I seen that does
not seem sweeter--it brings thoughts of you; never a crime that does not
deepen its shame because you are in the world. In prison, when I used
to mop my floor and clean down the walls; when I swept the dust from the
corners; when I folded up my convict clothes; when I ate the prison food
and sang the prison hymns; when I placed myself beside the bench in the
workshop to make things that would bring cash to my fellow-prisoners in
their need; when I saw a minister of religion or heard the Litany; when
I counted up the days, first that I had spent in jail and then the days
I had still to spend in jail; when I read the books from the prison
library of the land where you had gone, and of the struggle there; when
I saw you, in my mind's eye, in the cotton-fields or on the verandah of
your house in Virginia--I had but one thought, and that was the look in
your face at Playmore and Limerick, the sound of your voice as you came
singing up the hill just before I first met you, the joyous beauty of
your body."

"And at sea?" she whispered with a gesture at once beautiful and
pathetic, for it had the motion of helplessness and hopelessness. What
she had heard had stirred her soul, and she wanted to hear more--or
was it that she wished to drain the cup now that it was held to her
lips?-drain it to the last drop of feeling.

"At sea," he answered, with his eyes full of intense feeling--"at sea, I
was free at last, doomed as I thought, anguished in spirit, and yet with
a wild hope that out of it would come deliverance. I