e--you do not know what I have done. I am a thief."

"Pah!"

"It is true. I am a thief."

"What is it to me?" He laughed a laugh as tender as her eyes. "You are a
thief, for you have stolen my heart. For the rest, do you think that I
do not know you now? That I can be twice deceived? Twice take gold for
dross, and my own for another thing? I know you!"

"But you do not know," she said tremulously, "what I have done--what I
did last night--or what may come of it."

"I know that what comes of it will happen, not to one but to two," he
replied bravely. "And that is all I ask to know. That, and that you are
content it shall be so?"

"Content?"

"Yes."

"Content!"

There are things, other than wine, that bring truth to the surface. That
which had happened to the girl in the last few hours, that which had
melted her into unwonted song, was of these things; and the tone of her
voice as she repeated the word "Content!" the surrender of her eyes that
placed her heart in his keeping, as frankly as she left her hands in
his, proclaimed it. The reserves of her sex, the tricks of coyness and
reticence men look for in maids, were shaken from her; and as man to man
her eyes told him the truth, told him that if she had ever doubted she
no longer doubted that she loved him. In the heart which a single
passion, the purest of which men and women are capable, had engrossed
so long, Nature, who, expel her as you will, will still return, had won
her right and carved her kingdom.

And she knew that it was well with her--whatever the upshot of last
night. To be lonely no more; to be no longer the protector, but the
protected; to know the comfort of the strong arm as well as of the
following eye, the joy of receiving as well as of giving; to know that,
however dark the future might lower, she had no longer to face it alone,
no longer to plan and hope and fear and suffer alone, but with
_him_--the sense of these things so mingled with her gratitude on her
mother's account that the new affection, instead of weakening the old
became as it were part of it; while the old stretched onwards its pious
hand to bless the new.

If Claude did not read all this in her eyes, and in that one word
"Content?" he read so much that never devotee before relic rose more
gently or more reverently to his feet. Because all was his he would take
nothing. "As I stand by you, may God stand by me," he said, still
holding her hands in his, and with the table