his own, out of the purse always open and belonging to both, just as
though you were partners. You must feel--"

"Hush, for pity's sake, hush!" interrupted the other.

"You are going to see him again," Kitty persisted. "Now, don't you think
it just as well to know what the real truth is?"

"How do you know what is the truth?" asked the trembling little stranger
with a last attempt to hold her position, to conceal from herself the
actual facts.

"The Young Doctor and my mother and I were with him all the time he was
ill after he was shot, and the Trial had only told half the truth. He
wanted us, his best friends here, to know the whole truth, so he told us
that he left you because he couldn't bear to live on your money. It was
you made him feel that, though he didn't say so. All the time he told
his story he spoke of you as though you were some goddess, some great
queen--"

A look of hope, of wonder, of relief came into the tiny creature's eyes.
"He spoke like that of me; he said--?"

"He said what no one else would have said, probably; but that's the way
with people in love--they see what no one else sees, they think what no
one else thinks. He talked with a sort of hush in his voice about you
till we thought you must be some stately, tall, splendid Helen of Troy
with a soul like an ocean, instead of"--she was going to say something
that would have seemed unkind, and she stopped herself in time--"instead
of a sort of fairy, one of the little folk that never grow up; the same