"Corrie?"
"I have been with him to-night. I don't want father to know this because he wouldn't understand; he might even forbid me to go. Unless he forces an answer, I shall not say where I am to be. But Gerard said I must tell you everything and write to you often—I would have done that, anyhow. You won't mind my going away, now, when you know I am with him?"
She comprehended at last the change in him, the change from restless uncertainty to steady fixity of purpose, from an objectless wanderer to a traveller towards a known destination, comprehended with a passionate outrush of gratitude to the man who had wrought this in a generosity too broad to remember his own injury. The eyes she lifted to her brother's were splendidly luminous.
"No," she confirmed, in the exhaustion of relief. "I can bear to let you go from me, if you are to be with Mr. Gerard."
They nestled together—as each might have clung in such an hour to the mother they had left so far down the path of years—on the hearth from which one was self-exiled and the other about to be taken.
"Do you remember the story he told us?" Corrie asked, after a long pause. "About that Arabian fellow's vase and the pearls, you know? I—well, I meant what I said, about expecting to have lots of days like that, pearl-days. I couldn't see any farther than that! Yet that night—I don't expect now, what I did then; I've lost my chance for it. But I would like to do something for Allan Gerard before I die. I'd like to make all my pearls into one, and put it into his vase. Instead, he is doing things for me."
Her clasping arms tightened about him. Heretofore she always had turned a steady face to her brother, sparing him the reproach of grief, but now she helplessly felt her eyes fill and overflow. One comfort, one hope she had that he did not share. If he went with Allan Gerard, and if Gerard took home the wife he had seemed to woo, brother and sister would not be separated. Flavia Gerard would be in Allan Gerard's house, where Corrie was going.
Had Gerard thought of that, also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot there, with her?
"Dear," she essayed, her voice just audible, "dear, has Mr. Gerard ever spoken to you of me?"
Surprised, Corrie looked down at the bent head resting against his rough overcoat. Himself a lover, he yet had not suspected this other romance flowering beside his own; he did not guess the obvious secret, now.