"It is very wonderful," she said at last. "Wonderful … that you can care for me…. Oh, if I had known how noble you were, I should have told you all at once."
"Perhaps I should have been as ignoble as ever," said Stangrave, "if that young English Viscount had not put me on my mettle by his own nobleness."
"No! no! Do not belie yourself. You know what he does not;—what I would have died sooner than tell him."
Stangrave drew the arm closer through his, and clasped the hand. Marie did not withdraw it.
"Wonderful, wonderful love!" she said quite humbly. Her theatric passionateness had passed;—
"Nothing was left of her,
Now, but pure womanly."
"That you can love me—me, the slave; me, the scourged; the scarred—Oh Stangrave! it is not much—not much really;—only a little mark or two…."
"I will prize them," he answered, smiling through tears, "more than all your loveliness. I will see in them God's commandment to me, written not on tables of stone, but on fair, pure, noble flesh. My Marie! You shall have cause even to rejoice in them!"
"I glory in them now; for, without them, I never should have known all your worth."
The next day Stangrave, Marie, and Sabina were hurrying home to England! while Tom Thurnall was hurrying to Marseilles, to vanish Eastward Ho.