He dropped to his knees and hid his face against Bess, and grasped her with the hands of a drowning man.

“My God!...My God!...Oh, Bess!...Forgive me!  Never mind what I’ve done—­what I’ve thought.  But forgive me.  I’ll give you my life.  I’ll live for you.  I’ll love you.  Oh, I do love you as no man ever loved a woman.  I want you to know—­to remember that I fought a fight for you—­however blind I was.  I thought—­I thought—­never mind what I thought—­but I loved you—­I asked you to marry me.  Let that—­let me have that to hug to my heart.  Oh, Bess, I was driven!  And I might have known!  I could not rest nor sleep till I had this mystery solved.  God! how things work out!”

“Bern, you’re weak—­trembling—­you talk wildly,” cried Bess.  “You’ve overdone your strength.  There’s nothing to forgive.  There’s no mystery except your love for me.  You have come back to me!”

And she clasped his head tenderly in her arms and pressed it closely to her throbbing breast.

CHAPTER XIX.  FAY

At the home of Jane Withersteen Little Fay was climbing Lassiter’s knee.

“Does oo love me?” she asked.

Lassiter, who was as serious with Fay as he was gentle and loving, assured her in earnest and elaborate speech that he was her devoted subject.  Fay looked thoughtful and appeared to be debating the duplicity of men or searching for a supreme test to prove this cavalier.

“Does oo love my new mower?” she asked, with bewildering suddenness.

Jane Withersteen laughed, and for the first time in many a day she felt a stir of her pulse and warmth in her cheek.

It was a still drowsy summer of afternoon, and the three were sitting in the shade of the wooded knoll that faced the sage-slope Little Fay’s brief spell of unhappy longing for her mother—­the childish, mystic gloom—­had passed, and now where Fay was there were prattle and laughter and glee.  She had emerged Iron sorrow to be the incarnation of joy and loveliness.  She had growl supernaturally sweet and beautiful.  For Jane Withersteen the child was an answer to prayer, a blessing, a possession infinitely more precious than all she had lost.  For Lassiter, Jane divined that little Fay had become a religion.

“Does oo love my new mower?” repeated Fay.

Lassiter’s answer to this was a modest and sincere affirmative.

“Why don’t oo marry my new mower an’ be my favver?”

Of the thousands of questions put by little Fay to Lassiter the was the first he had been unable to answer.

“Fay—­Fay, don’t ask questions like that,” said Jane.

“Why?”

“Because,” replied Jane.  And she found it strangely embarrassing to meet the child’s gaze.  It seemed to her that Fay’s violet eyes looked through her with piercing wisdom.

“Oo love him, don’t oo?”

“Dear child—­run and play,” said Jane, “but don’t go too far.  Don’t go from this little hill.”