"Claire," she heard him say, with a tenderness of tone more exquisite than any he had yet used, "I couldn't help forgiving you, dear, no matter how hard I might try. Oh, darling, let us begin all over again! You say that you do love me at last! Well, I believe you! _I want to believe you, and I will!_ How could I ever punish you? You haven't been so greatly to blame--don't torment yourself by thinking you have. People were flattering and courting you; they made you a perfect queen; they turned your head. Now all that is over. I think there is a great happiness in store for us both, my love--a happiness that the money never brought us while it lasted. Perhaps, after all, it is better that I should find you weak. It makes you more human in my sight. I shan't bow down before you any more, as you say that I did; I shall only love you ... love you forever--love you till death, and beyond it, too, I hope!" He was kissing her cheek as he uttered these final words; but it had already seemed to take a certain chill, and in another moment he was forced to bear up her form, for it had no power whatever of self-support. She had fainted in his arms.... She found him close beside her when she regained consciousness. She lay upon the lounge in her own dressing-room upstairs. He was bathing her forehead with cologne, and holding to her nostrils a handkerchief drenched with it. He had begun to be alarmed at her continued swoon. The first thing that her eyes reopened upon was his smile of glad relief. The light of that smile stayed with Claire through years. It bathed her life in perpetual sunshine. Everything altered in a few more weeks. They left the great house and went to live in the smaller one, which Claire personally owned, and which Hollister would not let her give back to him, though she pleaded with him more than once on this subject. "No," he would always say. "It is yours, and that means it is mine as well. I meant, when the crash first came, that you should keep it, and I was glad that the law made it yours. If I let you give it back to me, this would look as if I had lost faith in you. And I have lost no faith; I have gained a new faith--that is all." 'To think that I should ever have known this man and not have loved him!' she would say to herself again and again. Every successive day brought with it a dear surprise. She felt toward her husband as though his nature were a region through which she had journeyed heedlessly but was now revisiting with sharpened vision, vitalized intelligence. Traits and qualities that she could not but remember him to have possessed, now assumed a beauty, a harmony, a proportion, an allurement that she had never before dreamed of recognizing. A fresh light, so to speak, flooded the beloved landscape of his character. Vale, grove, wayside, were all preciously different from of old. Over them sang awakened birds, and still higher leaned a shining sky, fond, fathomless, prophetic.