‘And that, in spite of our ridiculous position towards each other, I do not quite--hate you.’ ‘Laura, you are making me the happiest of men.’ ‘But I am saying very little.’ ‘If you knew how much it is to me! A world of hope, a world of delight, an incentive to high thoughts and worthy deeds, a regeneration of body and soul.’ ‘You are talking wildly.’ ‘I am wild with gladness. Laura, my love, my darling.’ ‘Stop,’ she said suddenly, turning to him with earnest eyes, very pale in the dim light, now completely serious. ‘Is it me or your cousin’s estate you love? If it is the fortune you think of, let there be no stage-play of love-making between us. I am willing to obey your cousin--as I would have obeyed him living, honouring him and submitting to him as a father--but let us be true and loyal to each other. Let us face life honestly and earnestly, and accept it for what it is worth. Let us be faithful friends and companions, but not sham lovers.’ ‘Laura, I love you for yourself, and yourself only. As I live, that is the truth. Come to me to-morrow penniless, and tell me that Jasper Treverton’s will was a forgery. Come to me and say: “I am a pauper like yourself, John, but I am yours,” and see how fond and glad a welcome I will give you. My dearest, I love you truly, passionately. It is your lovely face, your tender voice, yourself I want.’ He put his arm round her, and drew her, not unwilling, to his breast, and kissed her with the first lover’s kiss that had ever crimsoned her cheek. ‘I like to believe you,’ she said softly, resting contentedly in his arms. This was their parting. CHAPTER VIII. ‘DAYS THAT ARE OVER, DREAMS THAT ARE DONE.’ There was excitement and agitation in Cibber Street, Leicester Square, that essentially dramatic, musical, and terpsichorean nook in the great forest of London. La Chicot had narrowly escaped death. It had been all but death at the moment of the accident. It might be absolute death at any hour of the night and day that followed the catastrophe. At least this is what the inhabitants of Cibber Street told each other, and they were one and all as graphic and as full of detail as if they had just left La Chicot’s bedside. ‘She has never stirred since they laid her in her bed,’ said the shoemaker’s wife, at the dingy shop for ladies’ boots, two doors from the Chicot domicile; ‘she lies there like a piece of waxwork, pore thing, and every five minutes they takes and wets her lips with a feather dipped in brandy; and sometimes she says “more, more,” very weak and pitiful!’ ‘That looks as if she was sensible, at any rate,’ answered the good woman’s gossip, a letter of lodgings at the end of the street. ‘I don’t believe it’s sense, Mrs. Bitters; I believe it’s only an inward craving. She feels that low in her inside that the brandy’s a relief to her.’ ‘Have they set her leg yet?’