“Shall I tell you?” he asked. “Will you promise me not to be angry, and will you keep your promise?” “Yes, tell me; I promise,” she said. “I don’t believe I could fail to comprehend whatever it is that you have to say to me.” “Then what I have to say is this--what my heart burns to say, what I have had to fight myself, day and night, since the first day of your coming, to keep from saying, is this--that I love you, and that all my hope of joy is to have you for my wife.” She sprang to her feet, and looked at him with wonder and mystification in her eyes. “Ah!” he said; “you were mistaken. You cannot comprehend how I love you so, when, as you think, I know you so little. But there you are wrong. I know you, as no one else in all the world can possibly know you; and I think you, of all the world, are the one who best knows me. Here, look at this, and tell me if you have ever seen it before.” He took a packet from the drawer at his side, and put it in her hands. The color flew to her face, and her lips parted in a radiant smile. “Yes,” she said, “I have seen it before. Was this story written by you?” “It was,” he answered; “and it is because I know that you have read it and have understood that it is no story, but the baring of a man’s inmost heart, that I say you know me as no one else does. In the same manner also, it has come to pass that I know you.” “You got my manuscript?” she said. “It was you to whom Mr. Black sent it by mistake?” “It was,” he answered; “and perhaps it will not seem strange to you now when I say, we are not strangers, but are intimately, closely, mysteriously known to one another. This knowledge of you, on my part, has led to love--the first real passion of my life. I loved you from the hour that I read that paper. I loved your nature, your mind, your soul. Now that I have seen you, in all your goodness and loveliness and beauty, I love you beyond all my dreams of love. And you?” he said; “how is it with you, Ethel?” She looked at him with a slow, half-puzzled, wholly confiding, and happy smile. “If you had asked me to marry you without telling me this,” she said, “I could not have said ‘yes.’ I might not have told you the reason, but it would have been that my heart was already given to a man whom I had never seen, and who was known to me only as ‘Hugh Robertson.’” “But now,” he said, “now that you know that Hugh Robertson is really Arthur Hugh Hubert, what will you say? O Ethel, I love you with the hoarded love of many loveless and lonely years! Will you come to me, and be my wife?” His eyes were glowing. His face was flushed; his breathing came from him in quick breaths. He did not move toward her, but stood where he was, and held out his arms. And Ethel came to them, and as she rested there an instant, and then turned her face upward to receive his kiss, they both felt in that moment’s ecstasy the long thirsting of their souls satisfied at last, completely and eternally, by the divine draught of love.