noble setting; that good
mothers and sisters would be wanting to count you into their families,
and that the blossom of a happy womanhood would open perfect and full of
sweetness.

"I would have given my life for it. I did give it, such as it was; but
it was a very poor concern, I know--my life--and not enough to buy any
good thing.

"I have had a thought of something, but I'm afraid to tell it. It didn't
come to me to-day or yesterday; it has beset me a long time--for
months."

The girl gazed into the embers, listening intensely.

"And oh! dearie, if I could only get you to think the same way, you
might stay with me then."

"How long?" she asked, without stirring.

"Oh, is long as heaven should let us. But there is only one chance," he
said, as it were feeling his way.

"only one way for us to stay together. Do you understand me?"

She looked up at the old man with a glance of painful inquiry.

"If you could be--my wife, dearie?"

She uttered a low, distressful cry, and, gliding swiftly into her room,
for the first time in her young life turned the key between them.

And the old man sat and wept.

Then Kookoo, peering through the keyhole, saw that they had been looking
into the little trunk. The lid was up, but the back was toward the door,
and he could see no more than if it had been closed.

He stooped and stared into the aperture until his dry old knees were
ready to crack. It seemed as if 'Sieur George was stone, only stone
couldn't weep like that.

Every separate bone in his neck was hot with pain. He would have given
ten dollars--ten sweet dollars!--to have seen 'Sieur George get up and
turn that trunk around.

There! 'Sieur George rose up--what a face!

He started toward the bed, and as he came to the trunk he paused, looked
at it, muttered something about "ruin," and something about "fortune,"
kicked the lid down and threw himself across the bed.

Small profit to old Kookoo that he went to his own couch; sleep was not
for the little landlord. For well-nigh half a century he had suspected
his tenant of having a treasure hidden in his house, and to-night he had
heard his own admission that in the little trunk was a fortune. Kookoo
had never felt so poor in all his days before. He felt a Creole's anger,
too, that a tenant should be the holder of wealth while his landlord
suffered poverty.

And he knew very well, too, did Kookoo, what the tenant would do. If he
did not know what he kept in t