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 now. "Say, girl; come out of it!" he commanded, but with a lump of welling joy in his throat. "Love doesn't go by rights, Billie. Love goes by—by itself; by whims, by attractions, by—I can't tell you what. But mine goes all to you. I should have been concealing something if I hadn't admitted that your silence stung me terribly. In fact my love for you seemed to die in each of those awful nights; but it came to life each morning. Only today it was dead again, I thought; till White told me of your visit to the jail; and then it came alive again forevermore. You speak of shame, but you've made me a thousand times ashamed that I ever doubted you or reproached you. Now I know, Billie, that you were as right all the time as I thought I was. Our love is a deathless thing; yours couldn't be killed and mine couldn't.

"Here we are together, Billie, in the least romantic place in the world, this dingy old jail, in this tobacco-smelling office of Larry White's; but it all fades away. We're alone—alone on a mountainpeak. God and the sunlight are all around us, and the pulse of love sings in our veins. I want you, Billie; I want you, and I'm going to take you."

"In spite of everything?" she cried up to him timidly, her face lighting brilliantly with that new glory which had been growing upon it all the while her lover had been speaking.

"Because of everything," he answered fondly.

With a long, happy sigh, she rose to his embrace and he took her. But after what they two had passed through, it was withal a spiritual embrace; tenderness rather than heat; devotion, adoration rather than pas-