"Can you arrange to stay at Willoughby overnight? I have need to talk with you of matters of some importance. It will be very kind and good of you, if you can manage it."
After a moment's reflection, Marshall answered:
"I can stay till midnight, and that will give us time for our talk. I must be at Warrenton at reveille in the morning, but my horse will easily make the distance if I start by one o'clock."
Then he spoke a few words in a low tone to his lieutenant, who took command and marched the battery away, with all heads bared till they had passed out of the grounds.
"Let us not talk of my grandfather, please," said the girl, as the two entered the drawing-room. "Not that I shrink from that," she quickly added. "It can never be painful to me to speak of him. But it might distress you. You knew him and loved him long ago, before—before you and I quarrelled."
She did not shrink from this reference to the past, or try in any way to disguise the truth of it. Her mind was full of the dear dead man's last words spoken in praise of her courage and truthfulness, and she was more resolute than ever to live up to the character he had approved so earnestly and with so much of loving admiration.
"I think we did not quarrel," the young captain responded; "you did not, at any rate. I misjudged you cruelly, and in my anger I falsely accused you in my heart. Believe me, Agatha,"—he had called her so in the old days, and the name came easily to his lips now,—"believe me when I say that I have outlived all that bitterness. Let us be true, loyal friends hereafter, friends who know and trust each other, friends who do not misunderstand."
The girl held out her hand, in response, and made no effort to hide the tears with which she welcomed this healing of the old wounds.
The young man, too, rejoiced in a reconciliation which laid his old love for this woman for ever to rest and planted flowers of friendship upon its grave. He was astonished at his own condition of mind and heart. He learned now the truth that his mad love for Agatha had become completely a thing of the past, and that the bitterness which had at first succeeded it was utterly gone. He could think of her henceforth with a tender affection that had no trace of passion in it. The dead past had buried its dead, and the grass grew green above it.
At that moment dinner was announced, for Agatha had decreed that life at Willoughby should at once resume its accustomed order. "Chummie would like it so," she thought. So the two friends passed through the hall to the dining-room hand in hand, just as they had so often done in the old days before passion had come to disturb their lives.