pped it around her, and
produced a pocket-flask, saying; "this will support us the longest; it
is all I could find, or bring with me."

She sat, leaning against his shoulder, though partly turned away from
him: all she could say was: "you are very good."

After awhile he spoke, and his voice seemed changed to her ears. "You
must be thinking of Mr. Lawrie. It will, indeed, be terrible for him to
hear of the disaster, before knowing that you are saved."

"God has spared him that distress," she answered. "Mr. Lawrie died, a
year ago."

She felt a start in the strong frame upon which she leaned. After a
few minutes of silence, he slowly shifted his position towards her, yet
still without facing her, and said, almost in a whisper:

"You have said that I am very good. Will you put your hand in mine?"

She stretched hers eagerly and gratefully towards him. What had
happened? Through all the numbness of her blood, there sprang a strange
new warmth from his strong palm, and a pulse, which she had almost
forgotten as a dream of the past, began to beat through her frame. She
turned around all a-tremble, and saw his face in the glow of the coming
day.

"Leonard Clare!" she cried.

"Then you have not forgotten me?"

"Could one forget, when the other remembers?"

The words came involuntarily from her lips. She felt what they implied,
the moment afterwards, and said no more. But he kept her hand in his.

"Mrs. Lawrie," he began, after another silence, "we are hanging by a
hair on the edge of life, but I shall gladly let that hair break, since
I may tell you now, purely and in the hearing of God, how I have tried
to rise to you out of the low place in which you found me. At first you
seemed too far; but you yourself led me the first step of the way, and
I have steadily kept my eyes on you, and followed it. When I had learned
my trade, I came to the city. No labor was too hard for me, no study too
difficult. I was becoming a new man, I saw all that was still lacking,
and how to reach it, and I watched you, unknown, at a distance. Then I
heard of your engagement: you were lost, and something of which I had
begun to dream, became insanity. I determined to trample it out of my
life. The daughter of the master-builder, whose first assistant I was,
had always favored me in her society; and I soon persuaded her to love
me. I fancied, too, that I loved her as most married men seemed to love
their wives; the union would advance me