to keep a great love that had
come to him out of a world in which he no longer had a friend or a
home, and to that fight his soul went out as a drowning man grips at a
spar on a sea. As the girl's hands came to his face and he heard the
yearning, grief-filled cry of his name on her lips, he no longer sensed
the things he was saying, but held her close in his arms, kissing her
mouth, and her eyes, and her hair, and repeating over and over again
that now he had found her he would never give her up. Her arms clung to
him. They were like two children brought together after a long
separation, and Keith knew that Conniston's love for this girl who was
his sister must have been a splendid thing. And his lie had saved
Conniston as well as himself. There had been no time to question the
reason for the Englishman's neglect--for his apparent desertion of the
girl who had come across the sea to find him. Tonight it was sufficient
that HE was Conniston, and that to him the girl had fallen as a
precious heritage.

He stood up with her at last, holding her away from him a little so
that he could look into her face wet with tears and shining with
happiness. She reached up a hand to his face, so that it touched the
scar, and in her eyes he saw an infinite pity, a luminously tender glow
of love and sympathy and understanding that no measurements could
compass. Gently her hand stroked his scarred forehead. He felt his old
world slipping away from under his feet, and with his triumph there
surged over him a thankfulness for that indefinable something that had
come to him in time to give him the strength and the courage to lie.
For she believed him, utterly and without the shadow of a suspicion she
believed him.

"Tomorrow you will help me to remember a great many things," he said.
"And now will you let me send you to bed, Mary Josephine?"

She was looking at the scar. "And all those years I didn't know," she
whispered. "I didn't know. They told me you were dead, but I knew it
was a lie. It was Colonel Reppington--" She saw something in his face
that stopped her.

"Derry, DON'T YOU REMEMBER?"

"I shall--tomorrow. But tonight I can see nothing and think of nothing
but you. Tomorrow--"

She drew his head down swiftly and kissed the brand made by the heated
barrel of the Englishman's pistol. "Yes, yes, we must go to bed now,
Derry," she cried quickly. "You must not think too much. Tonight it
must just be of me. Tomorrow everything will