"I used sometimes to think not," Joan answered in a voice genuinely broken. "I used to be afraid that--if you should ever marry--you would not have been happy. Perhaps she--wasn't the right one for you."
Her eyes were downcast, but the compelling power of love in the man's caught them up to his and held them.
"I have known that she wasn't the right one for a long time," he said. "I have known the right one, and it is you. I love you with all my heart. I want you. You are the one woman on earth for me. I hadn't meant to say this now, but--I can't let you go out of my life. I must do all I can to keep you always."
"Don't!" gasped Joan. "Don't! it will kill me. Oh, if you only knew, how you would hate me!"
"Nothing could make me hate you."
"Yes. Wait!" And then Joan poured out the whole story--not only of this last fraud, but of all the frauds; the story of her "career."
He listened to the end, without interrupting her once. Then, at last, when the strange tale was finished, and the pale girl was silent from sheer exhaustion of the hopeless spirit tasting its punishment in purgatory, he held out his arms.
"Poor, little, lonely girl!" he said. "How sorry I am for you! How I want to comfort and take care of you all the rest of your life, so that it may be clear and white, as your true self would have it be! And--how glad I am that you're not a widowed Comtesse!"
————
She was in his arms still when a knock at the door roused them both from the first dream of real happiness the girl had ever known.