Emily Granville was burning with the divine fire of a sublime love. Her message to this man, who to her was more than all the earth and its treasures—more than life itself, burst from her lips with the passionate rush of a mountain stream seeking the ocean.
"Can you not understand that my love would be a poor weak, despicable thing if this were not so? That I would not be worthy of my womanhood?"
She choked back the tears as she asked these questions; she kissed the face which she pressed against her breast.
"That you might live—I would die with a smile and with but one regret: That it had not been permitted to me to bear a man child like you.
"But there is a future, Paul. The world will not drive us forth. Life—a fine, clean, God-fearing life is waiting for us over there—just through the Golden Gate. It is a golden gate which will close out the past—forever and ever."
"It cannot be locked out, dear."
"But it can. I can lock it out. The world must listen to me. It must believe me. Justice works in strange ways, but it brought us that poor man out of the sea. I can tell the world his story. He was with you on the Yakutat."
Paul started and caught her hand.
"Then, it was not a vagary," he whispered. "That was Driscoll—the quartermaster."
"He was in the boat with you that night. I don't know what name you knew him by. But he told me what happened—the truth. Had he never spoken I should have known the truth. If the world would not listen to you, it will listen to me! It will take back its lies! If——"