“What have I forgotten?” he gently asked, but without releasing her hand.

“That my uncle is gone.  I have no home, friends, position!  Do you know—­”

“I know that you are Mona Montague—­that I love you, and that I have found you,” he interrupted, his own voice quivering with repressed emotion, his strong frame trembling with eager longing, mingled with something of fear that his suit might be rejected.

“Then I am glad,” breathed Mona, and the next moment she was folded close to Raymond Palmer’s manly bosom, where she could feel the beating of the strong, true, loyal heart of her lover while with his lips pressed upon her silken hair he murmured fond words which betrayed how deep and absorbing his affection was for her—­how he had longed for her and how bitterly he had suffered because he could not find her.

CHAPTER XIX.

MONA IS JOYFULLY SURPRISED.

“Then you do love me, Mona?” Ray whispered, fondly, after a moment or two of happy silence.  “I must hear you say it even though you have tacitly confessed it and my heart exults in the knowledge.  I cannot be quite satisfied until I have the blessed confirmation from your own lips.”

“You certainly can have no reason to doubt it after such a betrayal as this,” Mona tried to say playfully, to shield her embarrassment, as she lifted her flushed face from its resting-place, and shot a glad, bright look into his eyes.  Then she added in a grave though scarcely audible voice:  “Yes I do love you with all my heart!”

The young man smiled; then with his arm still infolding her he led her beneath the chandelier and turned on a full blaze of light.

“I must read the glad story in your eyes,” he said, tenderly, as he bent to look into them.  “I must see it shining in your face.  Ah, love, how beautiful you are still!  And yet there is a sad droop to these lips”—­and he touched them softly with his own—­“that pains me; there is a heaviness about these eyes which tells of trial and sorrow.  My darling, you have needed comfort and sympathy, while I was bound hand and foot, and could not come to you.  What did you think of me, dear?  But you knew, of course.”

“I knew—­I hoped there was some good reason,” faltered Mona, with downcast eyes.

“You ‘hoped!’ Then you did think—­you feared that I, like other false friends, had turned the cold shoulder on you in your trouble?” he returned, a sorrowful reproach in his tone.  “Surely you have known about the stolen diamonds?”

“Yes, I knew that your father had been robbed.”

“And about my having been kidnapped also—­the papers were full of the story.”

Mona looked up, astonished.

“Kidnapped!” she exclaimed.  “No; this is the first that I have heard of that.”

“Where have you been that you have not seen the papers?” Ray inquired, wonderingly.