“I was going to die, Hoddy!” she whispered.  “You do love me?”

“God knows how much!” Suddenly he laid his head on her shoulder.  “But I’m a blackguard, too, Ruth.  I had no right to marry you.  I have no right to love you.”

“Why not?”

“I am a thief, a hunted man.”

“So that is what separated us!  Oh, Hoddy, you have wasted so many wonderful days!  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t!” He made as though to draw away, but her arms became hoops of steel.

“Because you did not wish to hurt me?”

“Yes.  If I let you believe I did not love you, and they found me, your shame would be negligible.”

“And loving me, you fought me, avoided all my traps!  I’m glad I’ve been so unhappy.  Remember, in your story—­look at it, scattered everywhere!—­that line? We arrive at true happiness only through labyrinths of misery.”

“I am a thief, nevertheless.”

“Oh, that!”

He raised his head, staring at her in blank astonishment.  “You mean, it doesn’t matter?”

“Poor Hoddy!  When you were ill in Canton, out of your head, you babbled words.  Only a few, but enough for me to understand that some act had driven you to this part of the world, where the hunted hide.”

“And you married me, knowing?”

“I married the man who bought a sing-song girl to give her her freedom.”

“But I was intoxicated!”

“So was the man you just fought in this room.  There is no hidden beast in you, Hoddy.  I could not love you else.”

“They may find me.”

“Well, if they send you to prison, I’ll be outside when they let you go.”

He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the lips.  “I’m not worth it.  You are all that I am or hope to be—­the celestial atom God put into me at the beginning.  Now He has taken that out and given it form and beauty—­you!”

“Wonderful hand!” Ruth seized his right hand and kissed it.  “All the wonderful things it is going to do!  If I could only know for certain that my mother knew how happy I’m going to be!”

“You love the memory of your mother?”

“It is a part of my blood ... my beautiful mother!”

He saw Enschede, putting out to sea, alone, memories and regrets crowding upon his wake.  Her father was right:  Ruth must never know.  The mother was far more real to her than the father; the ghostly far more substantial than the living form.  So long as he lived, Spurlock knew that in fancy he would be reconstructing that scene between himself and Ruth’s father.

Their heads touched again, their arms tightened.  Gazing into each other’s eyes with new-found rapture, neither observed the sudden appearance in the doorway of an elderly woman in travel-stained linen.

There was granite in her face and agate in her eyes.  The lips were straight and pale, the chin aggressive, the nose indomitable.  She was, by certain signs, charged with anger, but she saw upon the faces of these two young fools the look of angels and an ineffable kindness breathed upon her withered heart.