She looks at him with her large, clear blue eyes, with the glad tears of joy still pendant on the golden lashes and holds out her hands.
"I cannot refuse to forgive you since you have relented and brought me this invaluable paper," she answers, "and more especially since I know that I did you a cruel wrong. Can you forgive me, Vane?"
"Once I thought I could not, but it is easy enough now," he answers, gravely, just touching for a moment the soft, white, extended hands. "I have no longer any room in my heart for anger or resentment. I think only of my grief."
"For Reine!" she asks, with an almost imperceptible lifting of the golden eyebrows indicating surprise.
"For Reine," he answers, with a tortured sigh.
"Did she die abroad?" Maud asks in an awed and softened voice.
"She was drowned at midnight in the Atlantic Ocean, amid all the horrors of fire and flood," he groans.
"On the ill-fated Hesperus," she exclaims. "Oh, I read the news in the papers, but there were no particulars, and I did not dream of such a tragedy. You were with her, were you not? Why was it that you could not save her?"
His gloomy eyes fell with a look of loathing on the paper in her hand.
"She died, Maud, to save you from the consequences of your folly. She might have been saved but for that paper you hold in your hand," he answers, sternly.