WITH the death of Madame TrÈme, and the arrest of Jaffrey and of Maida, the danger to “The Pines” was over. It was a long time, however, before I was allowed to tell my story. I lay in a darkened room, waited upon by Mary, and the least sound or word would send me into a paroxysm of hysterical tears. The first person to whom I recounted my adventures was the detective Hovey, a certain gray-eyed and demure young man whom I had long known by another name. Our interview was very formal. I called him Mr. Hovey, and met his cool and unembarrassed look as rarely as I could. I was propped up in bed to make my statement. Dr. Haverstock was present, his hand often stealing to my pulse, and Mary stood near with a stimulant. She had made me as pretty as she could, the dear soul; had arranged my hair, and chosen my dainty dressing-gown, but I must have looked like a ghost; and it seemed to me that there lay a brand of shame across my face.

Mr. Hovey took down my statement and Dr. Haverstock witnessed it. I was told that I should have to appear in court at the trial of Madame's accomplices. At that, I shrank, and looked helplessly at Dr. Haverstock, and my eyes, in spite of all I could do, filled with tears.

“Oh, my dear,” said the doctor kindly, “it will be a long time yet. You will be strong enough to face anything.”

“There are some things,” I murmured shakily, “that I shall never be able to face.” I covered my eyes with my hands, and turned against the pillow.

I heard Dr. Haverstock whisper something, and I knew that Hovey and he had left the room. Paul had not said a word to me except the necessary questions. His face had been expressionless and pale. What else could I expect? How could any man act otherwise to the daughter of the famous Madame TrÈme?

The doctor, Mary, Mrs. Brane, were all wonderfully kind. I broke down again under Mrs. Brane's kindness.

“Oh, Janice, my poor child,” she said to me when I was at last allowed to see her, “why did n't you come to me? Why did you try to bear all this terror and misery yourself?”

I held her hand. “I wish I had come to you, dear Mrs. Brane. I wish for very many reasons that I had had the humility and good sense to do so. What now is there, except that statement of my wretched mother, to keep you, the whole world, every one, from thinking that I was a thief myself? From putting that construction upon my insane behavior here?”

“Well, Janice,” she said indulgently, “there is one person to prevent it. I, for one, would never have the courage to suggest such a theory in Paul Hovey's presence. He has written up your rescue of him so movingly, and told the story of it so appealingly, that I think you are rather in danger of being a sort of national heroine. In the papers, my dear, you are painted in the most glowing colors. I should n't wonder if there would be a movie written about you.”

“Paul,” I said,—“Paul has told it?”

“Yes, Paul. And I think he owes you an amende. In fact, we all do. I engaged a detective the day after Delia and Jane and Annie left, and very well I knew, of course, that our young student visitor was Skane's cleverest man. But I did not guess that from the first moment he suspected you. Poor child! Poor Janice! What misery you have been through all by your brave, desolate, little self!”

“From the first moment!” I repeated blankly. “From the first moment Paul thought that I was Madame TrÈme?”

My mind ran back over that meeting in the bookroom. I remembered his sharp, sudden speeches, the slight edge to his voice. I had thought him a coward with that hand in his pocket, and he, meanwhile, had imagined himself always under the eyes of the Red-Gold Strand.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brane. “One of the force saw you get off the train at Pine Cone, and was struck by your resemblance to the famous criminal.” (I remembered the man whose scrutiny had so annoyed me.) “He reported at headquarters Madame's possible presence, and they realized at once that if she was in it, the Pine Cone case was apt to be both dangerous and interesting. There was big game somewhere. So, without telling me how serious the situation might be, they chose Hovey, and sent him down here as a student of Russian literature. They knew that Madame had never come in contact with him. Paul Hovey has rather a remarkable history, Janice. Would you care to hear it?”

I bent my head.

“He began life as a young man with great expectations, and a super-excellent social position. But he was very careless in his choice of companions. It was the love of adventure, I suppose, like Harry Hotspur and his crew. At a house-party, not a very reputable one I am afraid, on Long Island,—this was a good many years ago—he got mixed up in a very tangled web, and disentangled himself with such cleverness and resource, discovering the guilty man before the police had even sniffed a trail, that Skane, half as a joke, urged him to turn detective. Hovey, too, treated it as a joke, but, not long after, my dear, the poor boy got himself into trouble—oh, nothing wicked! It was a matter of holding his tongue and keeping other people safe, or telling the truth and clearing himself of rather discreditable folly. He held his tongue, and most people believed his innocence. I think every one would have stood by him, for he was enormously popular, if the very people from whom he had the best right to expect mercy and loyalty had not turned against him—his uncle who had brought him up, and the girl to whom he was engaged. He was disinherited and turned out of doors, and the girl, a worldly little wretch, promptly threw him over. Hovey went straight to Skane, who welcomed him like a long-lost child. Since then Paul Hovey has become famous in his chosen line of work. Now you know his history. I learned it—what was not already public property—from a man, a friend of Paul's dead father, a man who loves Paul dearly, and has known him all his life.”

I was not sorry—selfish as the feeling was—to learn that Paul, too, had a grievance against the world; that he, too, was something of a waif and stray, another bit of Fate's flotsam like myself.

“And from the first moment he thought I was Madame TrÈme?”

“Yes—and fell in love with you. A nice situation for a detective, was n't it? Don't start! You know he did. But I must run away before I tell you any more secrets. I must leave Paul Hovey to make his own apologies, to plead his own cause. I am tiring you, as it is. You are getting much too pink.”

“I will never give Mr. Hovey a chance to make his apologies,” I said sadly. “And I am certain, dear Mrs. Brane, that he will never try for the chance. Who would? Who would want to—to love the daughter of—”

It was here that I broke down, and she comforted me. “Janice, darling,” she said when I was a little quieter, “Love is a very mighty god, and though they say he is blind, I believe that he sees like an immortal. If Paul Hovey loved you in spite of his best will and judgment, against every instinct of self-preservation, loved you to his own shame and anguish when he thought you a woman dyed in crime, a woman who had attempted his life, do you think he will stop loving you when he knows your history and your innocence?”

She left me before I could answer her question, but she left me without a ray of hope. I had made up my mind that I would never marry any one. And I was sure, with the memory of Paul's cold, questioning looks in our recent interview, that he would never come to me again.

But he did come.

We met in the sunny bookroom where I had first led him so long—it seemed very long—ago. I was sitting in the window seat trying listlessly to read, and listening heartbrokenly to the gay music of a mocking-bird in the tree outside, when his step sounded in the hall, and, while I stood, half risen to fly, he came in quietly and stood before me with his boyish and disarming smile.

My knees gave way, and I dropped back into my place, the book falling to the floor. I was trembling all over.

“Don't say you won't let me talk to you, Janice,” he pleaded, and his face was white with earnestness. “Don't try to run away from me. You must in all fairness hear me out.”

“There is nothing for me to listen to,” I stammered; “I have nothing to say to you.”

“Perhaps it is nothing to listen to,” he said, “but it is the most important thing to me in the world. It means my life—that's all.”

“To talk to me?”

“Yes. For God's sake, let us play no tricks with each other now. There has been too much disguise between us. I mistook you for a wicked woman—yes—but you knew that I mistook you, you knew that I loved you better than my own soul, you knew that I suffered damnably, and you did not undeceive me. I kept a policeman's guard upon you—yes—I let you find the paper, I let you get the translation, and, when I could force my heart to give in to my sense of duty, I tracked you down, and found you with the treasure. I saw your double go out through the kitchen-garden that night, and I thought, as I had thought from the beginning, that she was you. I followed her to the bridge. I followed her back to the house. I let her go into her hiding-place, and I set two men to watch that entrance while I went out to make sure of Maida and Jaffrey. Long before that night I had discovered the other opening to the passage—the opening in Robbie's window sill—-and had fastened it up so that none of the gang should light upon it. When I came back at my leisure, thinking to find my quarry in the hands of my two men, they told me that she had not come out, that they had waited according to orders, and had heard a long murmur of voices in the wall. Then I betook myself to the other opening, and dropped on you from above.” Here, all at once, his self-control broke down. He came and took my hands, drawing them up against his heart so that I rose slowly to my feet in front of him. “Do you know what it was like to me to feel that I was handing you over to justice? Even then, I loved you. Even then your beauty and your eyes—Oh, Janice, I can't think of the agony of it all. Don't make me go over it, don't make me explain it in cold blood. In cold blood? There is n't a drop of cold blood in my body when I hold your hands! Are you going to forgive me? Are you going to let me begin again? May I have my chance?”

I laughed bitterly enough. “Your chance to win the daughter of Madame TrÈme?”

At that he gripped me in his arms and kissed me till in the tumult of my heart I could not hear the music of the mocking-bird.

“My heart has always known you for the lovely and holy thing you are,” he told me later; “it knew you in spite of my bewildered wits.”

“Did it know me that night in the arbor?” I asked him shakily. And he was silent. I had to forgive him because he made no attempt to defend himself. He sat there, miserable and silent, letting my hand go, till I gave it back to him of my own free will, forgivingly.

And what more is there to tell?

Not long after the trial, Mrs. Brane left “The Pines” to marry Dr. Haverstock, who, to my great surprise, had been her suitor all these months. And as for Mary, she is living with Paul and me, and is the happiest of faithful nurses to our child. Paul's and my daughter is a little fairy, with demure gray eyes, and the blackest hair that I have ever seen.

And the treasure, the robe and crown which so bedazzled the weak head of Theodore Brane, and which drew Madame across the ocean to her death, they are again in the crypt of the cathedral at Moscow, where there stands, glittering once more between her golden candlesticks, our Holy and Beloved Lady of the Jewels.

THE END