Chapter 38

When Mary was well again, the curé married her to her Prince, and the two went together into the desert that Vanno loved. There it did not matter to them that Angelo was thinking coldly and harshly of them both; and perhaps there was even an added sweetness in Mary's happiness because a sacrifice of hers could spare pain to one very near to Vanno. She would not let her husband say that he could not forgive his brother.

"But if our love is to be perfect, we must forgive Angelo, and poor Marie too," she told him.

Late in the summer (they had left Egypt long ago, and were in the high mountains of Algeria), one day a letter came to Vanno, forwarded on from place after place, where it had missed him. Angelo had written at last.

"Perhaps you may have seen," he said, "in some paper, that in giving me a little daughter my wife died. She left a letter to be handed me after her death, if a presentiment she had were fulfilled. If she had lived, I would have forgiven her. Will you and Mary forgive me?"

There was no question as to what their answer would be.

"When two people love each other as we do," Vanno said, "I see now that there can be no room for any bitterness in their hearts."

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Page numbers and line numbers in tables of contents and in these notes refer to the original printed version.

Minor punctuation errors and incorrect accented characters in the original have been silently corrected.

Some words are ambiguously hyphenated in the original, for example compare "birdlike" (page 40) with "bird-like" (page 383). These have been left as in the original version.

The following words appear to be typographical errors in the original and have been corrected in this text:

Page 32, line 24, "Authur" (Arthur). Page 56, line 8, "playng" (playing). Page 73, line 2, "red" (read). Page 80, line 15, "expecially" (especially). Page 109, line 29, "Austrain" (Austrian). Page 155, line 20, "roulettle" (roulette). Page 224, line 8, "susperstition" (superstition). Page 225, line 9, "chesnuts" (chestnuts). Page 242, line 5, "nonenities" (nonentities). Page 307, line 17, "figuers" (figures). Page 364, line 5, "to" (To). Page 383, line 11, "pebblé" (pebble). Page 432, line 5, "craemy" (creamy). Page 475, line 10, "oblingingly" (obligingly). Page 488, line 7, "che" (chez).