"He will be my care!" she said--"The good God has heard my prayers and given him to me to be all mine!" She clasped her hands in a kind of ecstasy, "My life is for him and him alone! He will be my little child!--this big, strong, poor broken man!--and I will nurse him back to himself,--I will watch for every little sign of hope!--he shall learn to see through my eyes--to hear through my ears--to remember all that he has forgotten!..." Her voice broke in a half sob. Morgana put an arm about her. "Manella, Manella!" she said--"You do not know what you say--you cannot understand the responsibility--it would make you a prisoner for life--" "Oh, I understand!" and Manella shook back her dark hair with the little proud, decisive gesture characteristic of her temperament--"Yes!--and I wish to be so imprisoned! If we had not been rescued by you, we should have died together!--now you will help us to live together! Will you not? You are a little white angel--a fairy!--yes!--to me you are!--your heart is full of unspent love! You will let me stay with him always--always?--As his nurse?--his servant?--his slave?" Morgana looked at her tenderly, touched to the quick by her eagerness and her beauty, now intensified by the glow of excitement which gave a roseate warmth to her cheeks and deeper darkness to her eyes. All ignorant and unsuspecting as she was of the world's malignity and cruel misjudgments, how could it be explained to her that a woman of such youth and loveliness, electing to dwell alone with a man, even if the man were a hopeless paralytic, would make herself the subject of malicious comment and pitiless scandal! Some reflection of this feeling showed itself in the expression of Morgana's face while she hesitated to answer, holding the girl's hand in her own and stroking it affectionately the while. Manella, gazing at her as a worshipper might gaze at a sacred picture, instinctively divined her thought. "Ah? I know what you would say!" she exclaimed, "That I might bring shame to him by my companionship--always--yes!--that is possible!--wicked people would talk of him and judge him wrongly--" "Oh, Manella, dear!" murmured Morgana--"Not him--not him--but YOU!" "Me?" She tossed back her wealth of hair, and smiled--"What am I? Just a bit of dust in his path! I am nothing at all! I do not care what anybody says or thinks of ME!--what should it matter! But see!--to save HIM--let me be his wife!" "His wife!" Morgana repeated the words in amazement, and Lady Kingswood, laying down her work, gazed at the two beautiful women, the one so spiritlike and fair, the other so human and queenly, in a kind of stupefaction, wondering if she had heard aright.