"Oh, Zura!" I said helplessly.
"Yes, I did. Why not?"
She leaned 'way over and looked at me steadily. Then with something of her old passion she cried: "Listen to me, Ursula! Don't you dare think Page Hanaford guilty of crime! There isn't anything wrong with him. I know it. I know it."
"How do you know it, my child? Has he told you the real reason for his being in Japan? Has he told you why fear suddenly overtakes and confuses him? Or has he only dared to tell you other things?"
A joyous little sob caught in her throat. "His lips have told me nothing, Ursula. His eyes and my heart have told me all."
"And without knowing these things you love him, Zura?"
"Love him," she echoed softly. "Right or wrong, I love him absolutely!"
I looked at the girl in amazed wonder. There seemed to be an inner radiance as if her soul had been steeped in some luminous medium. She came nearer, her young face held close to mine. "Oh, I am so happy, so blissfully happy! For good or not, it's love for eternity. Dear, kind old friend!"—inclosing my face with her hands, she kissed me on the lips. In that faraway time of my babyhood my mother's good-by kiss was the last I had known. The rapture of the girl's caress repaid long, empty years. For a moment I was as happy as she. Then I remembered.
All day I had seen love perform miracles, and, like some invisible power, regulate the workings of life as some deft hand might guide a piece of delicate machinery; but that anybody could be happy, radiantly happy, with shadows and detectives closing around the main cause of happiness was farther than I could stretch my belief in the transforming power of joy. Surely this thing called "love" was either farseeing wisdom or shortsighted foolishness.