you are detected it means your own ruin, for
you could never explain away those tools. Yes! You are facing possible
ruin and disgrace. You might have to give up your work for years--have
you considered that? Oh, John Flint, stop a moment, and reflect! There
is nothing in this for you, John, nothing but danger. No, there's
nothing in it for you, except--"

He held up his hand, with a gesture of dignity and reproach.

"--except that I get my big chance to step in and save the girl I
happen to love, from persecution and wretchedness, if not worse," said
he simply. "If I can do that, what the devil does it matter what
happens to _me_? You talk about name and career! Man, man, what could
anything be worth to me if I had to know she was unhappy?"

The tides of emotion rushed over him and flooded his face into a
shining-eyed passion nakedly unashamed and beautiful. And I had
thought him casual, carelessly accepting a risk!

"Parson," he wondered, "didn't you _know_? No, I suppose it wouldn't
occur to anybody that a man of my sort should love a girl of hers. But
I do. I think I did the first time I ever laid eyes on her, and she a
girl-kid in a red jacket, with curls about her shoulders and a face
like a little new rose in the morning. Remember her eyes, parson, how
blue they were? And how she looked at me, so friendly--_me_, mind you,
as I was! And she handed me a Catocala moth, and she gave me Kerry.
'You're such a good man, Mr. Flint!' says she, and by God, she meant
it! Little Mary Virginia! And she got fast hold of something in me
that was never anybody's but hers, that couldn't ever belong to
anybody but her, no, not if I lived for a thousand years and had the
pick of the earth.

"It wasn't until she came back, though, that I knew I belonged to her
who could never belong to me. If I was dead at one end of the world
and she dead at the other, we couldn't be any farther apart than life
has put us two who can see and speak to each other every day!"

"And yet--" he looked at me now and laughed boyishly, "and yet it
isn't for Mayne, that she loves, it isn't for you, nor Eustis, nor any
man but me alone to help her, by being just what I am and what I have
been! Risks? Fail her? _I?_ I couldn't fail her. I'll get those
letters for her to-night, if Hunter has hidden them in the beam of his
eye!" He turned to me with a sudden white glare of ferocity that
appalled me. "I could kill him with my hands," said he, with a quiet
c