He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him.  He fell back, a hand to his brow.  “And that was why you fainted?” he asked incredulously.

She looked at him without answering.  As she began to realize how much she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.

He held out both hands to her.

“Aline!  Aline!” His voice broke on the name.  “It was I... "

“O blind Andre, it was always you — always!  Never, never did I think of him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when... when that theatre girl came into your life, and then... " She broke off, shrugged, and turned her head away.  “I thought of following ambition, since there was nothing left to follow.”

He shook himself.  “I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad,” he said.

“Blind, Andre; just blind,” she assured him.

“Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen.”

“And yet,” she answered him with a flash of the Aline he had known of old, “I have never found you lack presumption.”

M. de Kercadiou, emerging a moment later from the library window, beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if each saw Paradise in the other’s face.