"Forgive me," begged the humbled young fellow, trembling with joy in his humility. "It was weak and wicked in me. I deserved to be punished as I have been. And, oh, I did not deserve this happiness. But, my little girl, how could I help being deceived? There was your handwriting and your signature."
"Ah! I know who it was," broke out Clara. "It has been he all through. He shall pay for this, and for all," she added, her Spanish blood rising in her cheeks, and her soft eyes sparkling angrily for a minute.
"I have saved his life for the last time," returned Thurstane. "I have spared it for the last time. Hereafter—"
"My darling, my darling!" begged Clara, alarmed by his blackening brow. "Oh, my darling, I don't love to see you angry. Just now, when we have just been spared to each other, don't let us be angry. I spoke angrily first. Forgive me."
"Let him keep out of my way," muttered Thurstane, only in part pacified.
"Yes," answered Clara, thinking that she would herself send Coronado off, so that there might be no duel between him and this dear one.
Presently the lover added one thing which he had felt all the time ought to have been said at first.
"The letter—it was right. Although he wrote it, it was right. I have no claim to marry a rich woman, and you have no right to marry a poor man."
He uttered this in profound misery, and yet with a firm resolution. Clara turned pale and stared at him with anxious eyes, her lips parted as though to speak, but saying nothing. Knowing his fastidious sense of honor, she guessed the full force with which this scruple weighed upon him, and she did not know how to drag it off his soul.
"You are worth a million," he went on, in a broken-hearted sort of voice which to us may seem laughable, but which brought the tears into Clara's eyes.