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Her head just reached to his
shoulder. His arm, extended downwards, was about her waist. His spurs
jingled slightly.

"He had not seen me for ten years. He did not know me. He parted from me
for my sake, and he would never let me come back. He was always talking
in his letters of leaving Costaguana, of abandoning everything and
making his escape. But he was too valuable a prey. They would have
thrown him into one of their prisons at the first suspicion."

His spurred feet clinked slowly. He was bending over his wife as they
walked. The big parrot, turning its head askew, followed their pacing
figures with a round, unblinking eye.

"He was a lonely man. Ever since I was ten years old he used to talk to
me as if I had been grown up. When I was in Europe he wrote to me every
month. Ten, twelve pages every month of my life for ten years. And,
after all, he did not know me! Just think of it--ten whole years away;
the years I was growing up into a man. He could not know me. Do you
think he could?"

Mrs. Gould shook her head negatively; which was just what her husband
had expected from the strength of the argument. But she shook her
head negatively only because she thought that no one could know her
Charles--really know him for what he was but herself. The thing was
obvious. It could be felt. It required no argument. And poor Mr. Gould,
senior, who had died too soon to ever hear of their engagement, remained
too shadowy a figure for her to be credited with knowledge of any sort
whatever.

"No, he did not understand. In my view this mine could never have been
a thing to sell. Never! After all his misery I simply could not have
touched it for money alone," Charles Gould pursued: and she pressed her
head to his shoulder approvingly.

These two young people remembered the life which had ended wretchedly
just when their own lives had come together in that splendour of hopeful
love, which to the most sensible minds appears like a triumph of good
over all the evils of the earth. A vague idea of rehabilitation had
entered the plan of their life. That it was so vague as to elude the
support of argument made it only the stronger. It had presented itself
to them at the instant when the woman's instinct of devotion and the
man's instinct of activity receive from the strongest of illusions their
most powerful impulse. The very prohibition imposed the necessity of
success. It was as if they had been morally bound to make good their
vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of weariness and
despair. If the idea of wealth was present to them it was only in so
far as it was bound with that other success. Mrs. Gould, an orphan from
early childhood and without fortune, brought up in an atmosphere of
intellectual interests, had never considered the aspects of great
wealth. They were too remote, and she had not learned that they were
desirable. On the other hand, she had not known anything of absolute
want. Even the very poverty of her aunt, the Marchesa, had nothing

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