Then Doctor Chicago’s eyes flash open again, and he looks up startled; he has just recollected Lady Ruth’s story, and a wild hope rushes into existence, a hope that could not be put into words, but which takes the form of an idea that she whom the English girl met as Sister Magdalen, his mother, is near.

He looks up; his eyes fall upon a face that boasts of extreme beauty, a face of wondrous black eyes and cheeks aflame, a face that, set in sable coils of hair, would drive an artist wild with the desire to transfer its charms to canvas.

And John Craig, strange man, frowns.

Evidently there is something in his composition that prevents him from accepting what the prodigal gods have thrown in his path.

“You?” he says, bluntly, and with disdain.

The woman with the black eyes smiles sweetly as she continues to soothingly touch his forehead, which throbs and burns as though he endures the keenest pain.

“Did you imagine it could be any other, my dear John?  You deserted me, but I believe you failed to know your own mind.  At any rate I have determined not to desert you.”

“Pauline, you do not—­it is impossible for you to care for me after what has happened.”

“Impossible!  Why should it be?  I can’t help myself.  I have seen others profess to love me, have played with them as a queen might with her subjects who prostrated themselves before her.  Yet, John Craig, I never loved but once.  You have stirred my heart to its depths.  I am not able to analyze these feelings.  I only know what I know.”

She does not feel the modesty of a young girl; much acting before the public has made her brazen, this midnight beauty with the glowing eyes black as sloes, the pouting lips, the figure of a Hebe.

John Craig may have seen adventures before in his life, and probably has been in many a fix, being fond of spending his vacations in rambling over the wilderness away up in the Michigan peninsula, with a gun on his shoulder; but plainly he has now met the crisis of his whole career.

“Pauline, I am a frank fellow, as you know.  It is not in me to dissemble.  I am going to speak plainly with you,” he says, rising to a sitting posture, and looking the actress full in the eyes.

She moves uneasily, and her cheeks, which were erstwhile tinted with scarlet, grow pallid.  Then she sets her teeth and with a smile continues: 

“That is right, I hate a deceiver worse than anything else on earth.  It was your honest way, John Craig, that first drew me toward you.  Yes, speak your mind.”

Evidently she is in part prepared for the worst, though she has hoped that the old witchery might be thrown about the young doctor.

“When you treated me in that merciless way, long ago, the regard I felt for you died out of my heart—­your spell was broken.”

“Ah!  John, you have thought so, perhaps, just as I did, but I learned that these affections of ours are deeper than we suspect.  I believed I had dropped you forever, but time has taught me what a terrible wrench it must be that would tear the image of John Craig from my heart.”