e answered, laying a hand on his cheek.

"Ah, thank God!"

* * * * *

It was over a month before Mrs. Ravenel and Katrine were able to take
Frank south, where he longed to be. The St. Petersburg engagement was
cancelled, and the Metropolitan manager, angry at Katrine's
forgetfulness to notify him that she could not sing the night Mrs.
Ravenel had come for her, made many caustic newspaper criticisms. But
both events seemed entirely unimportant to her, for Frank's paralysis,
which the doctors had believed but a temporary affair, did not leave him
as soon as had been hoped.

There was a splendid Celtic recklessness in the way she surrendered
everything for him, a generosity which Mrs. Ravenel saw with commending
eyes, believing it, by some strange mother-reasoning, to be but just.
But Frank was far from taking the same attitude in the matter. Almost
the first day he was able to be wheeled on the great piazza in the
sunshine he spoke to Katrine of the time she must soon leave, to keep
the St. Petersburg engagements.

"I have no St. Petersburg engagements," she explained, briefly. "I
cancelled them."

He sat with closed eyes, but she saw the tears between the lids as he
spoke. "I have not had the courage to tell you," he said, at length,
slowly, "before, but all that McDermott said is true, Katrine."

"Indeed!" Words could not explain the tone. She might have received news
of the Andaman Islanders as carelessly.

"You know what it means to me!" he said, after a silence.

"I know what you think it means to you," she answered.

"It means that I have and am nothing. When I think of mother--" He
looked at Katrine, with her radiant beauty, as she reached upward for an
early rose. "And your friend McDermott," he went on, "has done a strange
thing. This morning I opened my mail for the first time since my
illness. In it I found a letter from him, saying that it could be proven
that my father had never made an early marriage, and that Quantrelle was
a great liar. I don't understand it. I saw Quantrelle myself, as well as
his brother, when I was in France. There is not a doubt the marriage was
an entirely legal one, not the shadow of a doubt. Ah," he cried,
"Katrine, it seems to kill me when I think of it!"

"Francis Ravenel," she cried, the old smile on her face as she came
toward him and placed her hand caressingly on his cheek, "you told me
once, not long ago, to ask you to marry me. I d