tion. "I'll tell you--everything.
Not only that little thing about my laughing, but--but more--everything.
Why I cannot be engaged to you. I must tell you--I know it--but, oh! not
to-day--not for a little while! Let me have this little time to be
happy. You sail a week from to-day. I'll write it all for you, and you
can read it on the way to New York. That will do--won't that do?" she
pleaded.

North took both her hands in a hard grasp and searched her face and her
eyes--eyes clear and sweet, though filled with misery. "Yes, that will
do," he said. "It's all nonsense that you can't be engaged to me. You
are engaged to me, and you are going to marry me. If you love me--and
you say you do,--there's nothing I'll let interfere. Nothing--absolutely
nothing." There was little of the saint in his look now; it was filled
with human love and masterful determination, and in his eyes smouldered
a recklessness, a will to have his way, that was no angel, but all man.

A week later Norman North sailed to New York, and in his pocket was a
letter which was not to be read till Bermuda was out of sight. When the
coral reef was passed, when the fairy blue of the island waters had
changed to the dark swell of the Atlantic, he slipped the bolt in the
door of his cabin and took out the letter.

"I laughed because you were so wonderfully two men in one," it began, "I
was in the church at St. George's the day when you sent the verger away
and went into the pulpit and said parts of the service. I could not tell
you this before because it came so close to the other thing which I must
tell you now; because I sat trembling before you that day, hidden in the
shadow of a gallery, knowing myself a criminal, while you stood above me
like a pitiless judge and rolled out sentences that were bolts of fire
emptied on my soul. The next morning I heard you reciting Limericks. Are
you surprised that I laughed when the contrast struck me? Even then I
wondered which was the real of you, the saint or the man,--which would
win if it came to a desperate fight. The fight is coming, Norman.

"That's all a preamble. Here is what you must know: I am the thief who
stole Mr. Litterny's diamonds."

The letter fell, and the man caught at it as it fell. His hand shook,
but he laughed aloud.

"It is a joke," he said, in a queer, dry voice. "A wretched joke. How
can she?" And he read on:

"You won't believe this at first; you will think I am making a poor
joke; but