w that he scarcely heard it.

"I love you!"

"I've loved you always!"

Then even in her joy the recollection of all that she had come through
to this moment brought back that quivering of her chin, which had
become only too familiar to him in days past. His head sank toward
her, and their lips met.

After a while he led her back to her chair, and knelt down to look up
at her. For there were other difficulties. He had nothing to give her,
he said; neither riches nor family nor honor nor any future of which
he could be assured. She stopped him, with a hand laid gently on his
lips. He held it there, kissing it. How it had toiled and hurt for
him, that little hand, still rough and scarred!

"Can you ever forgive me?" he pleaded.

"There's nothing to forgive, Philip. You did not understand."

"There! You're treating me like a child again!" he protested, smiling
contentedly.

"And once you scolded me dreadfully for that!"

"But you were right. I've been a child; for ten years I've been a
child that thought it was a man."

She did not reply to that, fearing to wound him. So another golden
silence fell between them, while he held her hands, stroking the hard,
cracked skin of them. After a while he brought a chair, and sat close
by her side, and told her all that had been left untold,--about his
boyhood, his ambitions, his ignorance and innocence, his work in Paris
and the future it seemed to hold for him; and then the girl on the
Seine boat, and what he saw one night in her apartment, and his
despair; his father's death, and the wanderings that followed; and
how the shy and introspective boy had become in one day a man of
violence and desperation, his heart full of hatred and bitterness.

"And so I thought, Marion, that you were all alike; not alike in all
things, but the virtuous more dangerous than the vicious, because more
calculating and cold. You even--I thought you were the most dangerous
of all. I knew you were good, but I said your goodness was only
another form of selfishness, that you had been reared in luxury, and
taught to expect as your right many things you had never earned and
never could earn or deserve. I said--Wait, dear--I said that the man
who should marry you would be nothing but a beast of burden, a slave.
It was so difficult to believe you could be content with--"

"With love!" she whispered.

"But _can_ you?" he demanded, a ghost of the old incredulity rising in
spite of all.

"I haven