“I know. But I love you—I’m sure now that that is what it is. You see, it’s one of two things for me—you or rum. That’s why I’m working at it overtime. You won’t regret it—hanged if you do.” VI THE OLD MAN’S LAST CENT Well, she did marry him, and she did not regret it—nor did he. To me it is a wonder that she did not. For he had done the threatened newspapering so well that already upon their arrival at the steamer all the passengers were lined up to await them. And the smile they got there followed them to Europe, and into the most remote corners of the globe where they penetrated to escape it. It became at last a smile of contempt. And he began to understand that it was for him alone and that the world had exempted his wife from it. “I’m glad for that,” he told her. “If I am to go about the world a cad and a fool, to be laughed at—I am glad that you are—” “To be _pitied_ as your victim?” laughed his happy wife. “No. I don’t want anything that is not yours, and you shall have nothing that is not mine.” If they escaped it for a day, they never did for two. Always the servants were in line where they arrived, with the expectation of them in their banal faces. But always she was excepted. “I wish I could rise with you,” sighed Ravant, whimsically. “I hate to be separated from you. But they won’t have me, and they won’t do without you. I suppose my claws still show somewhere.” “Whither I go, you shall go,” his wife threatened. “I am too happy—that is what the world sees. What care I—for anything but joy and you!” She kissed Ravant. But presently her “beauty” and her “magnetism” began to be paragraphic with him in the newspapers—of which he said he was glad, and was not. “Beloved,” he told her, “it is a pity you married me.” “Why?—beloved also.” “Because you might have had any one of the effete noblemen of Europe, and escaped newspapering.” “But I would only have been satisfied with a crowned head.” “I suppose even that is possible to the ‘prevalent goddess’”—he was reading from a newspaper. “I have it!” laughed his wife, touching the plate which covered his wound. And then, I am almost sorry to say, yet not quite, that a little mist came into the eyes of the Ravant who had once been a brute, and he remembered all those hospital days. “How splendid you have become,” he said. “Thanks to you,” she whispered in his arms, where still he was the savage Ravant and always would be. “But all I am you have made of me!” “But, too, all I am you have made of me!” she laughed. “One thing I take credit for,” he joyed with her, “smiles _do_ become your face.” “And thought and care yours. The lines of which we once spoke—are gone! From both our faces! Is not that wonderful?” “Wonderful,” he agreed. Suddenly she was serious.