North took both her hands in a hard grasp and searched her face and her eyes—­eyes clear and sweet, though filled with misery.  “Yes, that will do,” he said.  “It’s all nonsense that you can’t be engaged to me.  You are engaged to me, and you are going to marry me.  If you love me—­and you say you do,—­there’s nothing I’ll let interfere.  Nothing—­absolutely nothing.”  There was little of the saint in his look now; it was filled with human love and masterful determination, and in his eyes smouldered a recklessness, a will to have his way, that was no angel, but all man.

A week later Norman North sailed to New York, and in his pocket was a letter which was not to be read till Bermuda was out of sight.  When the coral reef was passed, when the fairy blue of the island waters had changed to the dark swell of the Atlantic, he slipped the bolt in the door of his cabin and took out the letter.

“I laughed because you were so wonderfully two men in one,” it began, “I was in the church at St. George’s the day when you sent the verger away and went into the pulpit and said parts of the service.  I could not tell you this before because it came so close to the other thing which I must tell you now; because I sat trembling before you that day, hidden in the shadow of a gallery, knowing myself a criminal, while you stood above me like a pitiless judge and rolled out sentences that were bolts of fire emptied on my soul.  The next morning I heard you reciting Limericks.  Are you surprised that I laughed when the contrast struck me?  Even then I wondered which was the real of you, the saint or the man,—­which would win if it came to a desperate fight.  The fight is coming, Norman.

“That’s all a preamble.  Here is what you must know:  I am the thief who stole Mr. Litterny’s diamonds.”

The letter fell, and the man caught at it as it fell.  His hand shook, but he laughed aloud.

“It is a joke,” he said, in a queer, dry voice.  “A wretched joke.  How can she?” And he read on: 

“You won’t believe this at first; you will think I am making a poor joke; but you will have to believe it in the end.  I will try to put the case before you as an outside person would put it, without softening or condoning.  My mother was very ill; the specialist, to pay whom we had sold her last jewel, said that she would die if she were not taken south; we had no money to take her south.  That night my brother lost his self-control and raved about breaking into a shop and stealing diamonds, to get money to save her life.  That put the thought into my mind, and I made a plan.  Randolph, my brother, is a clever amateur actor, and the rich Burr Claflin is our distant cousin.  We both know him fairly well, and it was easy enough for Randolph to copy his mannerisms.  We knew also, of course, more or less, his way of living, and that it would not be out of drawing that he should send up diamonds to his wife unexpectedly.  I planned it all, and