A hand was laid on Trafford's arm, and in the scanty light of the shadowy chapel the American found himself looking into eyes bright with tears, but tears not of sorrow or vexation, but of happiness and vast relief. "Oh, what a weight you have taken from off my heart--it was heavier than I could bear," she murmured. "I felt like a murderess, a guilty creature who had risen through blood to the summit of her base ambitions." "Then I am forgiven?" "There is nothing to forgive. You have helped me and served me with your splendid impetuosity and your fearless resource. A Grimlander would have slain Karl, and crowned his service with a deed of shame. You were illogical--and I--I almost love you for your noble lack of logic." "You almost love me?" he asked in a trance. "At least as much as I have ever loved----" She broke off suddenly, and smiling upon him one of her rarest smiles, she added: "Yes, George Trafford, I will marry you, and if the Queen of Grimland cannot wed an American, then I will no longer be Queen of Grimland." Trafford gazed into the pale, brave face as he had never gazed at any living thing. His breath caught with a short gasp. A strange fire had sprung to quivering life in his bosom; a wild march was pealing in his ravished ears. His feet were no longer on the chequered marble pavement of the Chapel Royal, but somewhere in the fine regions of rolling planets and shimmering nebulae. It was no mere human being who bent over that sweet young face and kissed the warm tears from the drooping eyelids as he breathed the one word "Gloria" in an echo of long-drawn sound, but a demi-god, an heroic anachronism with the passions of Phoebus in his kindling soul. "I thought love was worship," he said, as he strained the slim form to him. "So it is, and something more--something infinitely and deliciously more." "We are in church," she remonstrated, gently disengaging herself, "and not alone." But again he kissed her, and this time gently on the brow. "I was forgetting all things save one," he said, "and that is that you love me." "Almost love you," she corrected, with a sigh. "At least as much as you loved the others," he affirmed. "And that contents you?" she demanded, raising her eyebrows in well-feigned astonishment. Her question puzzled him. "It ought not to, of course," he said with wrinkled brow. "I ought to want all or nothing. But I would be content if it were even less you gave, for in the dim light of this ancient chamber I seem to see the workings of Fate." "Then you are willing on such a basis to go on with the ceremony?" "If you are content to do so," he returned gravely, "knowing that Karl is alive and may prevail, and that in that event no Parliament will trouble to undo what the good priest does this afternoon." Gloria looked him frankly in the face.