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“I don’t see how I missed it!” Here he paused a moment in meditation, and presently resumed with some suddenness:

“I thought that education, far better than Mother Nativity has given you, should have afforded your sweet charms a noble setting; that good mothers and sisters would be wanting to count you into their families, and that the blossom of a happy womanhood would open perfect and full of sweetness.

“I would have given my life for it. I did give it, such as it was; but it was a very poor concern, I know–my life–and not enough to buy any good thing.

“I have had a thought of something, but I’m afraid to tell it. It didn’t come to me to-day or yesterday; it has beset me a long time–for months.”

The girl gazed into the embers, listening intensely.

“And oh! dearie, if I could only get you to think the same way, you might stay with me then.”

“How long?” she asked, without stirring.

“Oh, is long as heaven should let us. But there is only one chance,” he said, as it were feeling his way.

“only one way for us to stay together. Do you understand me?”

She looked up at the old man with a glance of painful inquiry.

“If you could be–my wife, dearie?”

She uttered a low, distressful cry, and, gliding swiftly into her room, for the first time in her young life turned the key between them.

And the old man sat and wept.

Then Kookoo, peering through the keyhole, saw that they had been looking into the little trunk. The lid was up, but the back was toward the door, and he could see no more than if it had been closed.

He stooped and stared into the aperture until his dry old knees were ready to crack. It seemed as if ‘Sieur George was stone, only stone couldn’t weep like that.

Every separate bone in his neck was hot with pain. He would have given ten dollars–ten sweet dollars!–to have seen ‘Sieur George get up and turn that trunk around.

There! ‘Sieur George rose up–what a face!

He started toward the bed, and as he came to the trunk he paused, looked at it, muttered something about “ruin,” and something about “fortune,” kicked the lid down and threw himself across the bed.

Small profit to old Kookoo that he went to his own couch; sleep was not for the little landlord. For well-nigh half a century he had suspected his tenant of having a treasure hidden in his house, and to-night he had heard his own admission that in the little trunk was a fortune. Kookoo had never felt so poor in all his days before. He felt a Creole’s anger, too, that a tenant should be the holder of wealth while his landlord suffered poverty.

And he knew very well, too, did Kookoo, what the tenant would do. If he did not know what he kept in the trunk, he knew what he kept behind it, and he knew he would take enough of it to-night to make him sleep soundly.

No one would ever have supposed Kookoo capable of a crime. He was too fearfully impressed with the extra-hazardous risks of dishonesty; he was old, too, and weak, and, besides all, intensely a coward. Nevertheless, while it was yet two or three hours before daybreak, the sleep-forsaken little man arose, shuffled into his garments, and in his stocking-feet sought the corridor leading to ‘Sieur George’s apartment. The November night, as it often does in that region, had grown warm and clear; the stars were sparkling like diamonds pendent in the deep blue heavens, and at every window and lattice and cranny the broad, bright moon poured down its glittering beams upon the hoary-headed thief, as he crept along the mouldering galleries and down the ancient corridor that led to ‘Sieur George’s chamber.

‘Sieur George’s door, though ever so slowly opened, protested with a loud creak. The landlord, wet with cold sweat from head to foot, and shaking till the floor trembled, paused for several minutes, and then entered the moon-lit apartment. The tenant, lying as if he had not moved, was sleeping heavily. And now the poor coward trembled so, that to kneel before the trunk, without falling, he did not know how. Twice, thrice, he was near tumbling headlong. He became as cold as ice. But the sleeper stirred, and the thought of losing his opportunity strung his nerves up in an instant. He went softly down upon his knees, laid his hands upon the lid, lifted it, and let in the intense moonlight. The trunk was full, full, crowded down and running over full, of the tickets of the Havana Lottery!