"What? Why, what do you mean? I am all bewildered!" he exclaimed, looking from one to the other till a faint glimmer of the truth began to appear through the mists.
"Stupid boy!" again emphasized the lady, "whom did you come here to see?"
Quickly glancing at the beautiful, radiant, still-smiling face of the young girl, and then at the impressive features of the elder lady, Weldon Gardner, with bated breath and a dazed expression in his startled eyes, exclaimed:
"You—are—Evelyn Howard—you?"
"Exactly so. Doctor Gardner—Evelina Dent Howard—at your service!"
As she spoke, she placed her hand in his, and asked, in the liquid tones whose cadences he so well remembered, "Have you been punished enough for your unknightly scorn of the girl you condemned without trial?"
"Oh, forgive!" he pleaded, drawing her to a seat beside him. "I see it all now. What a dolt you must have thought me! How could you ever have tolerated me?"
"There is the conspirator," archly said Evelyn, pointing to Mrs. Duke. "She it was who enabled me to deceive you. I wrote to her immediately upon leaving your house for my cousin's, in Brooklyn, and she at once devised the scheme that I have found so hard to carry out. Meanwhile, she never lost sight of you."
It was long before the necessary explanations were exhausted, and when the new day dawned no happier man proudly entered upon his duties than did Weldon Gardner.