you wish me joy?" she added, holding
out her hand a little timidly.

Jeanne grasped it. To the girl's surprise Jeanne's eyes were full of
tears.

"Oh, I am so foolish!" she declared. "I have been so mad. I thought--
You said Mr. De la Borne."

"Hang it all!" the Duke exclaimed. "I believe you thought that she
meant our friend Andrew. Don't you know that all the world here half
the time calls Cecil, Mr. De la Borne, and Andrew, Mr. Andrew?"

Kate looked behind her, and touched the Duke on the sleeve.

"Wouldn't you like, sir," she asked, a little timidly, "to come for a
sail with me?"

The Duke saw what she saw, and notwithstanding his years and his
weight, he clambered into the little boat. Jeanne turned round and
walked slowly towards the man who came so swiftly along the dyke. It
was a dream! She felt that it must be a dream!

Andrew, with his gun over his shoulder, his rough tweed clothes
splashed with black mud, gazed at her as though she were an apparition.
Then he saw something in her face which told him so much that he forgot
the little catboat, barely out of sight, he forgot the little
red-roofed village barely a mile away, he forgot the lone figures of
the shrimpers, standing like sentinels far away in the salt pools. He
took Jeanne into his arms, and he felt her lips melt upon his.

"The Duke was right, then," he murmured a moment later, as he stood
back for a moment, his face transformed with the new thing that had
come into his life.

"Dear man!" Jeanne murmured.

They watched the boat gliding away in the distance.

"I believe," he declared, "that they went away on purpose."

She laughed as they scrambled down on to the marsh, and turned toward
the place where he had first met her.

"I believe they did," she answered.

End of Project Gutenberg's Jeanne of the Marshes, by E. Phillips Oppenheim

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