And Silas’s little wife was all bustle and nervousness; but Rory had not been in the house half an hour ere all this was gone, and she was quietly happy, with a kind of feeling at her heart that she had known Rory all his life, and had even nursed him when he was quite a little mite.
Day and dinner and all passed off right cheerily, and of course with dessert Silas nodded to his little wife, and his little wife opened a bottle of fresh green ginger, and produced the bun—the wonderful bun, which was a pudding one day and a cake the next.
Silas kept smirking and nodding so long at Rory over his first drop of green ginger, that Rory knew he was going to say something, and so, by way of encouragement,—
“Out with it, Silas,” says Rory.
“Only this,” says Silas: “Success to the wooing.”
Well, who else in all the wide world could Rory have taken advice from except from Silas, in one little matter that deeply concerned his future welfare?
“Go in and win,” had been Silas’s advice. “Go in and win, like the man you are. Faint heart never gained fair lady.”
It is pleasant for me to be able to state that Rory took his old friend’s advice to the letter. Now we know that the course of true love never did run smooth, and the course of Rory’s wooing proved no exception to the proverb, but everything came right in the end, as Rory himself was fond of observing, and all is well that ends well. Just one year after this visit to Silas, Rory led Helen Edith McGregor to the altar. What a beautiful bride she made—more modest and bonnie than the rose just newly blown, or gowans tipped with dew!
Rory and Allan were not greater friends after the wedding than they had been before—that were impossible; but they were now brothers, and Allan made a vow that Rory should make his home in Glentruim.
There is a mansion there now as well as a castle, and in it dwell Rory and his wife.