"Forgive? Ah, my darling! do you recollect also that I told you then that the time would come when your dear lips would ask pardon for what they uttered that night, and that when that hour arrived I would take my revenge? My wife! my pure, noble, beautiful wife! give me my revenge, for I cry with the long-banished Roman:
'Oh! a kiss—long as my exile
Sweet as my revenge!'"
He put his hand under her chin, drew the lips to his, and kissed them repeatedly.
Down among the graves, in the brown grass and withered leaves, behind a tall shaft, around which coiled a carved marble serpent with hooded head-there, amid the dead, crouched a woman's figure, with a stony face and blue chatoyant eyes, that glared with murderous hate at the sweet countenance of the happy bride. When St. Elmo tenderly kissed the pure lips of his wife, Agnes Powell smothered a savage cry, and Nemesis was satisfied as the wretched woman fell forward on the grass, sweeping her yellow hair over her eyes, to shut out the vision that maddened her.
Then and there, for the first time, as she sat enfolded by her husband's arm, Edna felt that she could thank him for the monument erected over her grandfather's grave.
The light faded slowly in the west, the pigeons ceased their fluttering about the belfry, and as he turned to quit the church, so dear to both, Mr. Murray stretched his hand toward the ivy-clad vault, and said solemnly:
"I throw all mournful years behind me; and, by the grace of God, our new lives, commencing this hallowed day, shall make noble amends for the wasted past. Loving each other, aiding each other, serving Christ, through whose atonement alone I have been saved from eternal ruin. To Thy merciful guidance, O Father! we commit our future."
Edna looked reverently up at his beaming countenance, whence the shadows of hate and scorn had long since passed; and, as his splendid eyes came back to hers, reading in her beautiful, pure face all her love and confidence and happy hope, he drew her closer to his bosom, and laid his dark cheek on hers, saying fondly and proudly:
"My wife, my life. Oh! we will walk this world,
Yoked in all exercise of noble end,
And so through those dark gates across the wild
That no man knows. My hopes and thine are one;
Accomplish thou my manhood, and thyself,
Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me."