“Dear Sir Ronald,” so it ran, “I am sorry to hear of your continued ill-health. I only returned home yesterday, or I should have written to express my sympathy sooner. Try to rouse yourself. They tell me you are very ill. From your sincere friend,
“Hermione Lorriston.”
He bowed his head over the paper and wept aloud.
“The dove with the olive leaf!” he said. “Shall I refuse it? Heaven’s gates open. Shall I close them and die in this outer darkness—this utter despair? Or, rather, shall I take the comfort Heaven sends me, and make her my own?”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE OLIVE LEAF.
Intense rapture filled the heart of Sir Ronald Alden when he read that little note. He had been so long in the night of sorrow, so long in the wide, waste waters of affliction, so long dead in life, that this word from the woman he loved so passionately was in very truth an olive branch to him.
He went to the mirror and looked at his face; it was handsome still, though thin, haggard and bearing the traces of deep emotions; he looked like a man on whom some terrible blight had fallen, for whom life had proved a failure and a wreck.
“Now,” he said to himself, “I will bid good-by to sorrow. Clarice has been avenged. The years of gloom that I have passed since her death should atone for my sin in marrying her without love. The white dove beckons me, the olive branch has come, a long farewell to the night, and hail to the morning! My love has saved me, whom I have worshiped with more than human affection.”
It was a surprise to his servants when that same day Sir Ronald walked from the hall with a bright face, his head erect and cheerful words on his lips. They had not seen him so for many a long month; it was as though he had arisen from the dead. He walked through the long, closed, desolate rooms, where silence and desolation had reigned so long.
“It will be so bright,” he thought, “when I can bring my darling home. Aldenmere will be like the Garden of Eden then.”