“No,” he said in a troubled voice, “I’m all right. But I’m afraid this place doesn’t suit you, Nouna; you’re getting so thin and white. You are paler than when I came back.” Nouna’s face changed; after a moment’s pause she sprang up with her old vivacity, and running to a looking-glass, gazed at her own reflection for some minutes, and then crept back to her husband’s side with a bright light in her eyes. As he looked at her inquiringly, she drew up the sleeve of his coat as far as she could, very gently, and then baring her own arm also, laid it beside his, and glanced up into his face with an odd, tender, yearning expression which, after a moment’s wonderment, opened his own dull eyes. For a few seconds neither spoke again. Then he snatched her into his arms and their eyes held each other’s for some minutes in an ecstasy of relief and gratitude. George had loved his wife better than his career, better than his own happiness. Nouna, since the fall of her first idol--her mother--had turned all her devotion to the husband who had cherished her so tenderly. Both, therefore, dreaded life without the other a thousand times worse than death, and when it dawned upon them that they were not to be parted again, there was no further sorrow possible for them in this world. “George,” said Nouna at last, in a broken whisper, “if you had never met me you would have been much happier, for you would have married that good Ella and have got on in the world and become a great man.” “Yes,” said he at once. “Well, aren’t you sorry?” “No.” “Why?” It was not easy to explain. The sailor, sinking with his ship at twenty-five, does not in his last moments wish that he had been a grocer, though if he had he might have gone on contentedly selling tea and candles for half a century. George, struck down by misfortune in the prime of his youth, had tasted some of life’s supremest joys, and the rolling years could give him no delight such as he had felt in running the whole gamut of an absorbing passion. He hesitated before he answered her. “If I had not married you,” he said at last, “you would never have been poor, you would have had as many lovely dresses and diamonds as you wanted, and nobody would ever have teased you to tell the truth, or to do anything you didn’t want to do. And yet you are not sorry you married me. What’s the reason?” She curled herself about him. “I don’t know,” she said shyly. “You’ve made me feel things I didn’t--feel--before.” “Well, Nouna, and you’ve done the same to me. Are you satisfied?” “Yes,” she said. “Then so am I.”