"Who will pray for you if I do not? In all the world there will not be one left to speak kindly of you if I speak ill. Oh, Dan, it will become known, and every one will be against you." "And can you think well of him who killed your brother?" "But you are in such sorrow; you are so miserable." Then Dan's great frame shook wofully, and he cried in his pain--"Mercy, mercy, have mercy! What have I lost? What love have I lost?" At that Mona's weeping ceased; she looked at Dan through her lashes, still wet, and said in another tone: "Dan, do not think me unmaidenly. If you had done well, if you had realized my hopes of you, if you had grown to be the good and great man I longed to see you, then, though I might have yearned for you, I would rather have died with my secret than speak of it. But now, now that all this is not so, now that it is a lost faith, now that by God's will you are to be abased before the whole world--oh, do not think me unmaidenly, now I tell you, Dan, that I love you, and have always loved you." "Mona!" he cried, in a low, passionate tone, and took one step toward her and held out his hands. There was an unspeakable language in her face. "Yes; and that where you go I must go also, though it were to disgrace and shame--" She had turned toward him lovingly, yearningly, with heaving breast. With a great cry he flung his arms about her, and the world of pain and sorrow was for that instant blotted out. But all the bitter flood came rushing back upon them. He put her from him with a strong shudder. "We are clasping hands over a tomb, Mona. Our love is known too late. We are mariners cast on a rock within a cable's length of harbor, but cut off from it by a cruel sea that may never be passed. We are hopeless within sight of hope. Our love is known in vain. It is a vision of what might have been in the days that are lost forever. We can never clasp hands, for, O God! a cold hand is between us, and lies in the hand of both." Then again she fell to weeping, but suddenly she arose as if struck by a sudden idea. "You will be taken," she said; "how can I have forgotten it so long? You must fly from the island. You must get away to-night. To-morrow all will be discovered." "I will not leave the island," said Dan, firmly. "Can you drive me from you?" he said, with a suppliant look. "Yes, you do well to drive me away." "My love, I do not drive you from me. I would have you here forever. But you will be taken. Quick, the world is wide." "There is no world for me save here, Mona. To go from you now is to go forever, and I would rather die by my own hand than face such banishment." "No, no, not that; never, never that. That would imperil your soul, and then we should be divided forever." "It is so already, Mona," said Dan, with solemnity. "We are divided forever--as the blessed are divided from the damned." "Don't say that, don't say that."