When he had finished the long story of his acceptance of Morton's guilt and of what had followed, she sat gazing at him with her look of awe. "I shall never stop being amazed that a man could do a thing like that," she said. "It was wonderful!" He shook his head. "No," he said slowly, "the real wonder is that you could learn to love a man whom you believed to be a criminal." For a moment he looked silently into her eyes; this great thing that had come to pass still seemed hardly true. "That's the wonder--Helen." It was the first time he had used her name, and he spoke it with a fervent hesitancy. He repeated it softly, "Helen!" She flushed. "I loved you long before I thought you were guilty," she said. "It seems that I have always loved you." "Always!" he repeated, amazed. "Always?--just as I've always loved you?" "Yes." For a space he was lost in his astonishment. "It doesn't seem possible. What was there in me to make you love me?" "I loved you because of your idealism, because there was an indefinable something in you that was good and great. I loved you--Oh, I don't know why I loved you. I just loved you. And how I felt when I thought you had taken the money! Oh, David, it was----" "Say it again!" he broke in. "What?" "David." She smiled. "David." Her face became serious. "It was weeks before I could sleep. I tried to forget you. As the years passed I sometimes thought I had; but when I tried to listen to other men talk of love, I knew I hadn't. I never forgot you. I was on trial with you. I was in prison with you. Though I kept away from you, I suffered with you when you were sick in that poor little room. I have searched for work with you. I have struggled with you to regain place in the world. Haven't you ever felt me beside you?" "I have always thought of you as far away from me. Of you here"--his eyes swept the library--"in this life." The glance about the room was an abrupt transition. For an hour or more he had been oblivious to all things save herself and himself. Now the library's material richness recalled to him the circumstances his rapture had for the time annihilated--her wealth, her social position, his poverty, his disgrace. Slowly these forced upon him one relentless fact. His face became grave, then pale. "Why, what's the matter?" she cried. "After all, we are as inexorably separated as ever," he said. "We can be merely friends." "Why?" "I'm poor--without position in life--covered with dishonour." "It's your soul that I love," she said. "It's rich, and full of honour." Her look, the ring in her voice, made him catch his breath. "What!--you don't mean you'd marry me--as I am!" "Yes." Wild joy sprang up within him. But he choked it down.