He had taken off his coat. She was lying upon it, while he knelt over her. The narrow moon was like a glory over his head.
“Why did you do it?” she asked him. “You might have let me get to rest when – when you didn’t care!”
“I do care!” he answered; “and I mean you to rest now all the days of your life – your new life, Missy. I have cared all the time. But now I care more than ever.”
“Your father and ‘Bella – ”
“Care as much as I do, pretty nearly, in their own way. Missy, dear, don’t you care, too, – for me?”
She looked at him gratefully through her starting tears. “How can I help it? You picked me up out of the gutter between you; but it was you alone that kept me out of it, after I’d gone; because I sort of felt all the time that you cared. But oh, you must never marry me. I am thinking so of your mother! She will never, never forgive me; I couldn’t expect it; and she is going to get quite better, you know – I feel sure that she is better already.”
He put his hand upon the hair that was only golden in the moonshine: he peered into the wan face with infinite sadness: for here it was that Missy was both right and wrong.
THE END