“I think he ought to be told,” said Ste. Marie.  “If we try to carry him away by force there’ll be a fight, of course, and—­who knows what might happen?  That we must leave for a last resort—­a last desperate resort.  First we must tell the boy.”  Abruptly he gave a cry of dismay, and the girl looked up to him, staring.  “But—­but you, Coira!” said he, stammering.  “But you!  I hadn’t realized—­I hadn’t thought—­it never occurred to me what this means to you.”  The full enormity of the thing came upon him slowly.  He was asking this girl to help him in robbing her of her lover.

She shook her head with a little wry smile.  “Do you think,” said she, “that knowing what I know now I would go on with that until he has made his peace with his family?  Before, it was different.  I thought him alone and ill-treated and hunted down.  I could help him then, comfort him.  Now I should be—­all you ever thought me if I did not send him to his grandfather.”  She smiled again a little mirthlessly.  “If his love for me is worth anything,” she said, “he will come back—­but openly this time, not in hiding.  Then I shall know that he is—­what I would have him be.  Otherwise—­”

Ste. Marie looked away.

“But you must remember, Coira,” said he, “that the lad is very young and that his family—­they may try—­it may be hard for him.  They may say that he is too young to know—­Ah, child, I should have thought of this!”

“Ste. Marie,” said the girl, and after a moment he turned to face her.  “What shall you say to Arthur’s family, Ste. Marie,” she demanded, very soberly, “when they ask you if I—­if Arthur should be allowed to—­come back to me?”

A wave of color flooded the man’s face and his eyes shone.  He cried: 

“I shall tell them, Coira, that if that wretched, half-baked lad should search this wide world round, from Paris on to Paris again, and if he should spend a lifetime searching, he would never find the beauty and the sweetness and the tenderness and the true faith that he left behind at La Lierre—­nor the hundredth part of them.  I should say that you are so much above him that he ought to creep to you on his knees from the rue de l’Universite to this garden, thanking God that you were here at the journey’s end, and kissing the ground that he dragged himself over for sheer joy and gratitude.  I should tell them—­Oh, I have no words!  I could tell them so pitifully little of you!  I think I should only say, ‘Go to her and see!’ I think I should just say that.”

The girl turned her head away with a little sob.  But afterward she faced him once more, and she looked up to him with sweet, half-shut eyes for a long time.  At last she said: 

“For love of whom, Ste. Marie, did you undertake this quest—­this search for Arthur Benham?  It was not in idleness or by way of a whim.  It was for love.  For love of whom?”

For some strange and inexplicable reason the words struck him like a blow and he stared whitely.