of that--before I die! Let us part friends--_now_. They will
tell you I have--redeemed--the name."

The words died slowly and with difficulty on his lips, and as his
father's hand closed upon his in a strong grasp of tenderness and
reconciliation, his lids closed, his head fell back, and a deep-drawn,
labored sigh quivered through all his frame; and Lion Winton, bowing
down his grand white crest, wept with the passion of a woman. For he
knew not whether the son he loved was living or dead--he knew not
whether he was not at the last too late.

* * * * *

Three months further on, Lady Ida Deloraine sat in her warm bright nest
among the exotics, gazing out upon the sunny lawns and the green
woodlands of Northamptonshire. Highest names and proudest titles had
been pressed on her through the five years that had gone, but her
loveliness had been unwon, and was but something more thoughtful, more
brilliant, more exquisite still than of old. The beautiful warmth that
had never come there through all these years was in her cheeks now, and
the nameless lustre was in her eyes, which all those who had wooed her
had never wakened in their antelope brilliancy, as she sat looking
outward at the sunlight; for in her hands lay a camellia, withered,
colorless, and yellow, and eyes gazed down upon the marvellous beauty of
her face which had remembered it in the hush of Virginian forests, in
the rush of headlong charges, in the glare of bivouac fires, in the
silence of night-pickets, and in the din of falling cities.

And Bertie's voice, as he bent over her, was on her ear.

"That flower has been on my heart night and day; and since we parted I
have never done that which would have been insult to your memory. I have
tried to lead a better and a purer life; I have striven to redeem my
name and my honor; I have done all I could to wash out the vice and the
vileness of my past. Through all the years we have been severed I have
had no thought, no hope, except to die more worthy of you; but now--oh,
my God!--if you knew how I love you, if you knew how my love alone saved
me----"

His words broke down in the great passion that had been his redemption;
and as she lifted her eyes upward to his own, soft with tears that had
gathered but did not fall, and lustrous with the light that had never
come there save for him, he bowed his head over her, and, as his lips
met hers, he knew that the redeemed life he laid at