“I do.”

“I thought so.  I want to thank you, now, for your generous forbearance.  I want to tell you how your keeping my secret made a different being of me.  If you had betrayed me to justice, I might have been now an inmate of a prison cell.  Margie Harrison, your silence saved me!  Do me the justice to credit my assertion, when I tell you that I did not enter my grandfather’s house because I cared for the plunder I should obtain.  I had taken a vow to be revenged on him for his cruelty to my parents, and Sharp, the man who was with me, represented to me, that there was no surer way of accomplishing my purpose than by taking away the treasures that he prized.  For that only I became a house-breaker.  I deserved punishment.  I do not seek to palliate my guilt, but I thank you again for saving me!”

“I could not do otherwise than remain silent.  When I would have spoken your name, something kept me from doing it.  I think I remembered always the pitiful face of the little street-sweeper, and I could not bear to bring him any more suffering.”

“Since those days, Miss Harrison, I have met you frequently—­always by accident—­but to-night it is no accident.  I came here on purpose.  For what, do you think?”

“I do not know—­how should I?”

“I have come here to tell you what I longed to tell you years ago! what was no less true then than it is now; what was true of me when I was a street-sweeper, what has been true of me ever since, and what will be true of me through time and eternity!”

He had drawn very near to her—­his arm stole round her waist, and he sat looking down into her face with his soul in his eyes.

“Margie, I love you!  I have loved you since the first moment I saw you.  There has never been a shade of wavering; I have been true to you through all.  My first love will be my last.  Your influence has kept me from the lower depths of sin; the thought of you has been my salvation from ruin.  Margie, my darling!  I love you!  I love you!”

“And yet you kept silence all these years!  Oh, Archer!”

“I could not do differently.  You were as far above me as the evening star is above the earth it shines upon!  It would have been base presumption in the poor saloon-waiter, or the dry-goods clerk, to have aspired to the hand of one like you.  And although I loved you so, I should never have spoken, had not fate raised me to the position of a fortune equal to your own, and given me the means of offering you a home worthy of you.  But I am waiting for my answer.  Give it to me, Margie.”

Her shy eyes met his, and he read his answer in their clear depths.  But he was too exacting to be satisfied thus.

“Do you love me, Margie?  I want to hear the words from your lips.  Speak, darling.  They are for my ear alone, and you need not blush to utter them.”

“I do love you, Archer.  I believe I have loved you ever since the first.”