For an hour Jean sat on the steps, watching the lights of the camp, as one by one they were extinguished, until one light alone burned. It was in the window of the office. There she knew a man was working steadily and bravely, and her heart beat irregularly as the realization came, that it was the man whom with her whole heart she loved and trusted for all the future, whatever might have been the past. The hot blood came surging into her cheeks only to recede and leave them pale. Rising, she walked slowly across to the office. She hesitated a moment, her hand on the door-knob, then throwing back her head proudly, she opened the door softly and entered. Her bearing was that of a soldier who surrenders without prejudice to his pride. Loring was bending over his work and did not see her as she stood in the doorway. She watched his pen toiling over the paper before him. The drooping dejection in his whole attitude cried out to her of his need for her. “Stephen!” she half whispered. The man jumped to his feet, startled by the sound of the voice of which he had been thinking. He turned to her, his face white and tense with the strain of wonder and surprise. In three steps he crossed the room to her. “Is anything wrong?” he exclaimed anxiously. “Yes, something is wrong,” she answered, looking steadily into his eyes. “I was wrong. I told you that I did not trust you. I do.” “Jean,” he gasped, half suffocated. “Do you mean that after I had broken my word to you at Quentin, you could possibly forgive?” “I forgave that at the time.” His face was drawn with the conflict between an impossible hope and a desperate fear. “That was the only time in my life that I ever broke my word, Jean, but breaking it to you made it impossible for you to believe in me. You told me so this morning, and I realized it. You forgive me that now,” he cried, with a sudden flash of intuition, “because you are afraid that in losing you, I shall lose myself again. Jean, though you are all there is in life for me, I will not let you sacrifice yourself to your splendid sympathy. Dearest, can’t you see that, as you said; if there were a shadow of doubt on your mind you could never be happy with me?” “It was not what you think which made me say I did not trust you. It was something, Stephen, which I know would be impossible in the man you are now. I could not put your dishonesty to your guardian out of my mind, until I realized that that was no more a part of the Stephen Loring I know now than the faults which I had forgiven.” Loring looked at her in amazement. “My dishonesty towards my guardian?” he exclaimed. “Jean, dear, what do you mean?” “I was told,” she said sadly, “that you had borrowed heavily from him, and never returned the loan; but we can pay it back together,” she went on bravely.