“You know nothing about us,” said she. “My own, how blind you must have been when you went away and left me nothing of your cruel self but a riding-glove.”
He laughed, no doubt well pleased.
“It was you, then, who had taken it? I looked for it everywhere, and was forced to go away without it.”
“You did not look here,” she answered, and warm from the whitest bosom in the world she drew the missing glove that had lain there ever since the night he left her.
“George,” she added, and the love-light in her eyes betrayed her feelings no less than the low, soft accents of her voice, “you know now that I prize your little finger more than all the rest of the world. I never saw another face than yours that I cared twice to look upon, and it is my happiness, my pride, to think that I was never loved by any man on earth but you!”
She raised her head and looked around in triumph while she spoke. Her eye, resting on the church of the distant village, caught a gleam of white from a newly-raised tomb-stone amongst its graves. An old man wrapping up his tools was in the act of leaving that stone, for he had finished his task. It was but to cut the following inscription:—
Florian de St. Croix.
✚
R. I. P.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Au petit couvert.
[2] A national banking scheme was about this period proposed to the Regent of France by a financial speculator of Scottish extraction named Law.