“Uncle! dear uncle!” cried Eweretta, going to him swiftly.
“I am going to do it!” he exclaimed, “I am going to break my promise! Philip Barrimore, this is not Aimée Le Breton. It is your own Eweretta!”
Then he gasped for breath. Philip stared from one to the other in staggering bewilderment.
“It was my sin—my own great sin,” went on Alvin.
Then, in a burst, he told the whole miserable story, finishing by saying: “Marry, my children—soon. I must wait to see that. Then I go back to the prairie.”
His face looked different from what they had ever seen it—from what anyone had ever seen it. It was happy.
“I am no longer the ill-starred Thirteenth Man,” he asserted. “I am been so fortunate as to see the lovers who were separated by my crime reunited, and the money of which I robbed an angel given back.”
Eweretta flung her arms about her uncle’s neck. She was no longer the calm Miss Le Breton. She was the old impulsive Eweretta, and was weeping unrestrainedly.
“Uncle, dear uncle, you must not leave us and go back to the old hard, lonely life. We want you, Philip and I, and no one must ever know this story. Strangers would not ever understand how you were hunted and driven always; how you never had a chance; how you thought yourself cursed from your birth, and that nothing seemed to matter. Strangers would not know that you had all the time a big, loving, starved heart, starved for love, that no one gave you, even your mother. But I love you, Uncle Thomas, I love you!”
The rough Colonial’s face had upon it a light indescribable, as he said: “I unlucky! I, who have found love! No, I am rich. I am fortunate! The prairie will be no more lonely. I shall live in this hour. But I must go—yes, I must go! the prairie calls, and calls.”