f such men.

"Well, he owes me several years of life. I put in a bad hour that
night."

He knew that "several years of life" was a misstatement; but, then, they
were both sinners.

Her eyes flashed, she stamped her foot, and her fingers clinched.

"I wish I'd killed him when I killed his bear!" she said.

Then excitedly she described the scene exactly as it occurred. He
admired the dramatic force of it. He thrilled at the direct simplicity
of the tale. He saw Vanne Castine in the forearms of the huge beast,
with his eyes bulging from his head, his face becoming black, and he saw
blind justice in that death grip; Christine's pistol at the bear's head,
and the shoulder in the teeth of the beast, and then!

"By the Lord Harry," he said, as she stood panting, with her hands fixed
in the last little dramatic gesture, "what a little spitfire and brick
you are!"

All at once he caught her away from the open window and drew her to him.
Whether what he said that moment, and what he did then, would have been
said and done if it were not for the liqueur he had drunk at Sophie's
house would be hard to tell; but the sum of it was that she was his and
he was hers. She was to be his until the end of all, no matter what
the end might be. She looked up at him, her face glowing, her bosom
beating--beating, every pulse in her tingling.

"You mean that you love me, and that--that you want-to marry me?" she
said; and then, with a fervent impulse, she threw her arms round his
neck and kissed him again and again.

The directness of her question dumfounded him for the moment; but what
she suggested (though it might be selfish in him to agree to it) would
be the best thing that could happen to him. So he lied to her, and said:

"Yes, that's what I meant. But, then, to tell you the sober truth, I'm
as poor as a church mouse."

He paused. She looked up at him with a sudden fear in her face.

"You're not married?" she asked, "you're not married?" then, breaking
off suddenly: "I don't care if you are, I don't! I love you--love you!
Nobody would look after you as I would. I don't; no, I don't care."

She drew up closer and closer to him.

"No, I don't mean that I was married," he said. "I meant--what you
know--that my life isn't worth, perhaps, a ten-days' purchase."

Her face became pale again.

"You can have my life," she said; "have it just as long as you live, and
I'll make you live a year--yes, I'll make you live ten years. L