Page:George Gibbs--Love of Monsieur.djvu/237

 for a bare existence lay in the bounty of a Spaniard? The thought grew upon him and oppressed him and drove all the joy from his heart. All this she had done for him—for him. He rolled the thought over and over in his mind, like a sweetmeat in the mouth, with a new taste of delicacy and delight at every turn. She had given it all for him—that he, the man she had affected so profoundly to despise, might be exalted. It was not a triumph, but a quiet joy, the joy that the sick feel at the touch of a ministering angel. It did not matter what the cause, whether she had made this sacrifice for the principle or whether she had made it for the individual. He was the cause of this great outflow of human kindness and self-sacrifice from the deep, warm well-springs of this wonderful woman’s heart, which he had so often sought to reach and sought in vain. The glimmer of a single tear which had trembled a moment upon her cheek in the lantern-light reached to the very quick of the unrevealed secret depths of his nature, where no plummet had ever before sounded. It had glistened a jewel more inesti- 225