She lifted eloquent eyes to his face.

“Oh, it is not that,” she stammered, a rosy light flooding cheek and brow.  “It is not that at all.  But you know nothing about me.  If you knew, you would very likely think as others do, and——­”

“Then do not tell me anything about yourself, if it will trouble you.  I do not care what others think.  If you have poisoned a husband, I should know that he needed poisoning, and any way I should love you and stand by you.”

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said gravely.

“Then if you have done nothing wrong, we will prove it to the world, or, if we cannot prove it, we will fly to some desert island and live there in peace and love.  That is the way I feel about you.  I know that you are good and true and lovely!  Any one might as well try to prove to me that you were crazy as that you had done wrong in any way.”

Her face grew strangely white.

“Well, suppose I was crazy?”

“Then I would take you and cherish you and try to cure you, and if that could not be done, I should help you to bear it.”

“Oh, you are wonderful!” she breathed, the light of a great love growing in her eyes.

The bare, prosaic walls stood stolidly about them, indifferent to romance or tragedy that was being wrought out within its walls.  The whirl and hum of the city without, the grime and soil of the city within, were alike forgotten by these two as their hearts throbbed in the harmony of a great passion.

“Do you think you could learn to love me?” said the man’s voice, with the sweetness of the love song of the ages in its tone.

“I love you now,” said the girl’s low voice.  “I think I have loved you from the beginning, though I never dared to think of it in that way.  But it would not be right for me to become your wife when you know practically nothing about me.”

“Have you forgotten that you know nothing of me?”

“Oh, I do know something about you,” she said shyly.  “Remember that I have dined with your friends.  I could not help seeing that they were good people, especially that delightful old man, the Judge.  He looked startlingly like my dear father.  I saw how they all honored and loved you.  And then what you have done for me, and the way that you treated an utterly defenceless stranger, were equal to years of mere acquaintance.  I feel that I know a great deal about you.”

He smiled.  “Thank you,” he said, “but I have not forgotten that something more is due you than that slight knowledge of me, and before I came out here I went to the pastor of the church of which my mother is a member, and which I have always attended and asked him to write me a letter.  He is so widely known that I felt it would be an introduction for me.”

He laid an open letter in her lap, and, glancing down, she saw that it was signed by the name of one of the best known pulpit orators in the land, and that it spoke in highest terms of the young man whom it named as “my well-loved friend.”