‘He daren’t tell her,’ Dave stammered, awkwardly, ‘because if she—she—if he found she cared nothing for him, he says, it would break his heart, Nell.’

Her lip quivered, and as he ventured to glance up at her their eyes met, and he saw that her’s were full of tears. Flurried, and feeling that his advocacy was succeeding only too well, he went on confusedly:

‘You don’t ask who he is or she is, Nell, but—but he thought perhaps you—you might guess at it…’

She was down on her knees beside him; her arms were about his neck, her face hidden close against his, so that he could not see how the roses had blown again in her cheeks and that the light of a divine compassion was shining in her eyes with a radiance caught from no heaven that ever spanned this motley earth.

‘Oh, she guessed it, Dave—she did guess it long ago,’ she sobbed, ‘but she wanted to be sure, and she waited—waited until now. She guessed it, though you tried to hide it from her, and shrank from asking her to share your life with you because you were so crippled and helpless, but—oh, Dave! she loved you before that, and—and it grieved her sometimes to think you could fancy she didn’t love you now—now when you need her love far more than ever.’

What could he say? All he had desired was his, when he was fearing it was wholly lost to him; he had blindly accepted despair and it had changed to hope as he grasped it, and he was not stoical and unselfish enough to relinquish it again.

‘But I am a mere wreck,’ he faltered, feebly, ‘and nigh helpless—’

‘The more you’ll need my help.’

‘I shall never be fit for other work than I’m doing, and I—I doubt if what I can earn—’

‘I can earn more than sufficient for myself, Dave—never think of that any more.’

Her womanly pity, her fearless and self-sacrificing love for him filled him with wonder and intense thankfulness. He could not understand it, he could scarcely even believe the reality of his own happiness.

‘I don’t deserve it,’ he said, ‘I can never deserve it—’

But she placed her hand upon his lips, and would hear no more.

Later, when they were both calm, he told her of Bob Harris, and frankly confessed what had led him to speak to her as he had done, and how, in pleading Bob’s cause, he had involuntarily pleaded his own.

‘And the only thing that troubles me,’ he concluded, ‘is that I must tell him the truth, Nell—I feel almost as if I had wronged him, and—he said it would break his heart.’

‘You have not wronged him, Dave, for I never should have cared for him,’ she said gravely. ‘I am sorry for him too; but, dear, one had to be broken—which would you rather it was, his heart or mine?’