not murder your cousin!"

This was not a query but an assertion. Colonel Harris's loyalty had
not wavered, but he could not contrive to keep the note of anxiety out
of his voice: nor did he reiterate the assertion when Luke made no
answer to it.

Once more the latter passed his hand over the back of his head. You
know that gesture. It is so English! and always denotes a certain
measure of perturbation. Then he said with seeming irrelevance:

"I suppose I had better go now."

His eyes sought Louisa's, trying to read what she thought and felt.
Imagine the awful moment! For he loved her, as you know, with that
intensity of passion of which a nature like his--almost cramped by
perpetual self-containment--is alone capable. Then to have to stand
before her wondering what the next second would reveal, hardly daring
to exchange fear for certitude, because of what that certitude might
be.

He sought her eyes and had no difficulty in finding them. They had
never wandered away from his face. To him--the ardent
worshipper--those eyes of hers had never seemed so exquisitely
luminous. He read her soul then and there as he would a book. A soul
full of trust and brimming over with compassion and with love.
Colonel Harris was loyal to the core; he clung to his loyalty, to his
belief in Luke as he would to a rock, fearful lest he should flounder
in a maze of wonderment, of surmises, of suspicions. God help him! But
in Louisa even loyalty was submerged in a sea of love. She cared
nothing about suspicions, about facts, about surmises. She had no room
in her heart for staunchness: it was all submerged in love.

There was no question, no wonderment, no puzzle in the eyes which met
those of Luke. You see she was just a very ordinary kind of woman.

All she knew was that she loved Luke: and all that she conveyed to him
by that look, was just love.

Only love.

And love--omnipotent, strange, and capricious love--wrought a curious
miracle then! For Colonel Harris was present in the room, mind you, a
third--if not an altogether indifferent--party, there where at this
moment these two should have been alone.

It was Colonel Harris's presence in the room that transformed the next
instant into a wonderful miracle: for Luke was down on his knees
before his simple-souled Lou. She had yielded her hand to him and he
had pressed an aching forehead against the delicately perfumed palm.

In face of that love which she had given him, he could