Dull Vernon began at last to have a glimmer of insight into the girl’s secret feelings. He shook hands with her, let her walk as far as the very end of the field, noticing with admiration which had suddenly, after the strain of the morning, again grown passionate, her springing walk and graceful, erect carriage. Then he ran after her on the wings of the wind, and placed himself, panting, with his back to the gate she was approaching.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said, as he looked with sparkling eyes into her face. “But you seem to forget I’ve lent you thirty pounds. I shall want it back to pay my passage.”
Olivia caught her breath, and her face, which was wet with tears, grew happy again.
“I’d forgotten all about it,” said she, in a tremulous voice, half saucily, half demurely. “But anyhow, you can’t have it.”
“And why not, Miss Denison?” asked Vernon, coming a step nearer.
“Because I—I don’t want you to go away,” answered she.
And she fell into his arms without further invitation, and gave him a tender woman’s kiss, an earnest of the love and sympathy he had hungered for these ten years!
The true story of the murder at St. Cuthbert’s never became commonly known. At the inquest which was opened on the remains found in the crypt, nobody who had anything to tell told anything worth hearing. But, then, nobody was very anxious to discover the truth, for rumors too dreadful for investigation began to fly about; and nobody was astonished when, the health of his children requiring a change to a warmer climate, the Reverend Meredith Brander got, by the interest of his uncle, Lord Stannington, an appointment at Malta, for which place he started, with his wife and family, without delay.
The vacant living of Rishton was given by Lord Stannington to his other nephew, Vernon; and Olivia, though lamentably unlike the popular ideal of a clergyman’s wife, became as much idolized by the poor of the parish as her husband was already.
John Oldshaw got Rishton Hall Farm; for Mr. Denison’s friends persuaded him to give up farming while he had still something left to lose. But the farmer did not long survive his coveted happiness. Dying in a fit of apoplexy, he left his broad acres in the care of his son Mat, who, instead of setting up as a country gentleman, as his sisters declared he would do if he had any spirit, married little Lucy, made her a good husband, and remained for ever, in common with his wife, the idolatrous slave of her late mistress.