"He used to say: 'My boy, there's only one thing in the world that's worth while. And that is love.'" "Why, that's what Daddy always said, almost his very words!" she cried, her eyes filling. "If I only knew--" he began. But she could endure no more. She rose swiftly to her feet, her eyes devouring him, her arms stretched out. "Marion!" he cried, and leaped to catch her, and folded her close, as he had clasped her in the cave. But now the arms that stole up around his neck did not fall away weakly as before, but tightened, and held him. A long time they remained thus, in a silence broken only by the crackling of the flames, which they did not hear, and the wind rising outside the cottage, for which they did not care. At length he put his fingers under her chin, and raised her head so that he could look into her eyes. "I believe it now!" he said. "It's true!" she answered, so low that he scarcely heard it. "I love you!" "I've loved you always!" Then even in her joy the recollection of all that she had come through to this moment brought back that quivering of her chin, which had become only too familiar to him in days past. His head sank toward her, and their lips met. After a while he led her back to her chair, and knelt down to look up at her. For there were other difficulties. He had nothing to give her, he said; neither riches nor family nor honor nor any future of which he could be assured. She stopped him, with a hand laid gently on his lips. He held it there, kissing it. How it had toiled and hurt for him, that little hand, still rough and scarred! "Can you ever forgive me?" he pleaded. "There's nothing to forgive, Philip. You did not understand." "There! You're treating me like a child again!" he protested, smiling contentedly. "And once you scolded me dreadfully for that!" "But you were right. I've been a child; for ten years I've been a child that thought it was a man." She did not reply to that, fearing to wound him. So another golden silence fell between them, while he held her hands, stroking the hard, cracked skin of them. After a while he brought a chair, and sat close by her side, and told her all that had been left untold,--about his boyhood, his ambitions, his ignorance and innocence, his work in Paris and the future it seemed to hold for him; and then the girl on the Seine boat, and what he saw one night in her apartment, and his despair; his father's death, and the wanderings that followed; and how the shy and introspective boy had become in one day a man of violence and desperation, his heart full of hatred and bitterness.