"Say you believe me." 

"I would stake my life on your innocence, father," she replied, through her tears. "I believe in you as I do in Heaven. You shall not die! I will save you, father. I--I--will--marry Jasper Wilde, if that will save you!" 

She spoke the words clearly, bravely. Her father did not realize that they nearly cost her her life--that they dug a grave long and deep, in which her hopes and rosy day-dreams were to be buried. 

"You have saved me, Bernardine!" he cried, joyously. "Oh, how you must love me--poor, old, and helpless as I am!" 

She answered him with kisses and tears; she could not trust herself to speak. 

She rose abruptly from her knees, and quitted the room with unsteady steps. 

"Thank Heaven it is over!" muttered David Moore, with a sigh. "Bernardine has consented, and I am saved!" 

The day that followed was surely the darkest sweet Bernardine Moore had ever known. But it came to an end at last, and with the evening came Jay Gardiner. 

He knew as soon as he greeted Bernardine and her father that something out of the usual order had transpired, the old basket-maker greeted him so stiffly, Bernardine so constrainedly. 

Bernardine's manner was quite as sweet and kind, but she did not hold out to him the little hand which it was heaven on earth to him to clasp even for one brief instant. 

Looking at her closely, he saw that her beautiful dark eyes were heavy and swollen with weeping. "Poor child! She is continually grieving over the drinking habit of her father," he thought; and the bitterest anger rose up in his heart against the old basket-maker for bringing a tear to those beautiful dark eyes. 

Again the longing came to him to beat down all barriers that parted her from him, take Bernardine in his arms, and crying out how madly he loved her, bear his beautiful love away as his idolized bride to his own palatial home. But the thought of that other one, to whom he was in honor and in duty bound, kept him silent. 

He realized that for his own peace of mind and hers he must never see Bernardine again; that this must be the last time. 

"I am sorry your father has fallen asleep, yet I do not wish to waken him, for I have come to say farewell to him and to you, Miss Moore," he said, huskily. 

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