The last words fell from her one by one, while a single tear rolled from her eyelid and trickled along her cheek.
'Yes, yes, Louisa; I do know it—I know all. A chance has told me how your dear father's name has been used to banish me for ever from your sight; how a forgery of his handwriting——'
'What! who could have told you what my father's last note contained?'
'He who wrote it confessed it in my hearing—Ulick Burke. Nay, I can even repeat the words' But as I spoke, a violent trembling seized her; her lips became bloodless; she tottered, and sank upon the chair. I had only time to spring forward and catch her in my arms, and her head fell heavily back, and dropped on my shoulder.
I cannot, if I would, repeat the words which in all the warm eloquence of affection I spoke. I could mark by her heightened colour that the life-blood again coursed freely in her veins, and could see that she heard me. I told her how through every hardship and suffering, in all the sorrow of disappointed ambition, in the long hours of captivity, my heart had ever turned to her; and then, when we did meet, to see her changed!
'But you do not blame—you cannot blame me if I believed——'
'No, if you tell me now that but for this falsehood you have not altered; that your heart is still as much my own as I once thought it.'
A faint smile played on her lips as her eyes were turned upon me; while her voice muttered—
'And do you still love me?'
I pressed her hand to my lips in rapture, when suddenly the door opened and Paul Rooney rushed in.