“I had finished my letter and thought I would come out to explore a little,” she said, as he joined her. “You have come back?” “Yes,” he said, “I have come back to you.” She glanced at him questioningly, startled by his tone, but before his eager look her eyelids dropped, and a soft glow of color suffused her face. “Cecil,” he said, “do you remember what you said years ago about men who worked hard to make their fortune and then retired and were miserable because they had nothing to do?” “Oh yes,” she said, “I remember it very well, and have often seen instances of it.” “I am like that now,” he continued. “My work seems over, and I stand at the threshold of a new life. It was you who saved me from ruin in my old life—will you be my helper now?” “Do you think I really could help?” she said wistfully. He looked at her gentle eyes, at her pure, womanly face, and he knew that his life was in her hands. “I do not know,” he said gravely. “It depends on whether you could love me—whether you will let me speak of my love for you.” Then, as he paused, partly because his English words would not come very readily, partly in hope of some sign of encouragement from her, she turned to him with a face which shone with heavenly light. “There must never be any secrets between us,” she said, speaking quite simply and directly. “I have loved you ever since you first came to us—years ago.” It was nothing to Frithiof that they were standing at the side of the king’s highway—he had lost all sense of time and place—the world only contained for him the woman who loved him—the woman who let him clasp her in his strong arm—let him press her sweet face to his. And still from the distance came the sound of many waters, and the faint tinkle of the cowbells, and the song of the little black and white birds. The grave gray mountains seemed like strong and kindly friends who sheltered them and shut them in from all intrusion of the outer world, but they were so entirely absorbed in each other that they had not a thought of anything else. “With you I shall have courage to begin life afresh,” he said, after a time. “To have the right to love you—to be always with you—that will be everything to me.” And then as he thought of her true-hearted confession, he tried to understand a little better the unseen ordering of his life, and he loved to think that those weary years had been wasted neither on him nor on Cecil herself. He could not for one moment doubt that her pure, unselfish love had again and again shielded him from evil, that all through his English life, with its hard struggles and bitter sufferings, her love had in some unknown way been his safeguard, and that his life, crippled by the faithlessness of a woman, had by a woman also been redeemed. All his old morbid craving for death had gone; he eagerly desired a long life, that he might live with her, work for her, shield her from care, fill up, to the best of his power, what was incomplete in her life.