elentlessly until I saw that love had come to take in
your heart the place of ambition. Then I desisted."

"Until you saw that love had taken the place of ambition!" Tears
had been gathering in her eyes whilst he was speaking. Now amazement
eliminated her emotion. "But when did you see that? When?"

"I--I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time... surely, Aline,
that morning when you came to beg me not to keep my engagement with him
in the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?"

"For him! It was concern for you," she cried, without thinking what she
said.

But it did not convince him. "For me? When you knew--when all the world
knew what I had been doing daily for a week!"

"Ah, but he, he was different from the others you had met. His
reputation stood high. My uncle accounted him invincible; he persuaded
me that if you met nothing could save you."

He looked at her frowning.

"Why this, Aline?" he asked her with some sternness. "I can understand
that, having changed since then, you should now wish to disown those
sentiments. It is a woman's way, I suppose."

"Oh, what are you saying, Andre? How wrong you are! It is the truth I
have told you!"

"And was it concern for me," he asked her, "that laid you swooning when
you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my
eyes."

"Wounded? I had not seen his wound. I saw him sitting alive and
apparently unhurt in his caleche, and I concluded that he had killed you
as he had said he would. What else could I conclude?"

He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him. He fell back,
a hand to his brow. "And that was why you fainted?" he asked
incredulously.

She looked at him without answering. As she began to realize how much
she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his
error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.

He held out both hands to her.

"Aline! Aline!" His voice broke on the name. "It was I..."

"O blind Andre, it was always you--always! Never, never did I think
of him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while,
when... when that theatre girl came into your life, and then..." She
broke off, shrugged, and turned her head away. "I thought of following
ambition, since there was nothing left to follow."

He shook himself. "I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad," he said.

"Blind, Andre; just blind," she assured him.

"Blind only where it would have been presumption