The mother’s face had softened as she watched him and listened to his tender words about Celia and now she answered gently:
“I am not sure—perhaps not! It was a very grave question to face. I don’t know that I can blame you for doing nothing. It would have been terrible for her and us and everybody and have made it all so public. Oh, I think you did right not to do anything publicly—perhaps—and yet—it is terrible to me to think you have been forced to marry my daughter in that way.”
“Please do not say forced,—Mother—” said Gordon laying both hands earnestly upon hers and looking into her eyes, “I tell you one thing that held me back from doing anything was that I so earnestly desired that what I was passing through might be real and lasting. I have never seen one like her before. I know that if the mistake had been righted and she had passed out of my life I should never have felt the same again. I am glad, glad with all my heart that she is mine, and—Mother!—I think she is glad too!”
The mother turned toward her daughter, and Celia with starry eyes came and knelt before them, and laid her hands in the hands of her husband, saying with ringing voice:
“Yes, dear little Mother, I am gladder than I ever was before in my life.”
And kneeling thus, with her husband’s arm about her, her face against his shoulder, and both her hands clasped in his, she told her mother about the tortures that George Hayne had put her through, until the mother turned white with horror at what her beloved and cherished child had been enduring, and the brother got up and stormed across the floor, vowing vengeance on the luckless head of poor George Hayne.
Then after the mother had given her blessing to the two, and Jeff had added an original one of his own, there was the whole story of the eventful wedding trip to tell, which they both told by solos and choruses until the hour grew alarmingly late and the mother suddenly sent them all off to bed.
The next few days were both busy and happy ones for the two. They went to the hospital and gladdened the life of the little newsboy with fruit and toys and many promises; and they brought home a happy white dog from his boarding place whom Jeff adopted as his own. Gordon had a trying hour or two at court with his one-time host, the scoundrel who had stolen the cipher message; and the thick-set man glared at him from a cell window as he passed along the corridor of the prison whither he had gone in search of George Hayne.
Gordon in his search for the lost bridegroom, whom for many reasons he desired to find as soon as possible, had asked the help of one of the men at work on the Holman case, in searching for a certain George Hayne who needed very much to be brought to justice.
“Oh, you won’t have to search for him,” declared the man with a smile. “He’s safely landed in prison three days ago. He was caught as neatly as rolling off a log by the son of the man whose name he forged several years ago. It was trust money of a big corporation and the man died in his place in a prison cell, but the son means to see the real culprit punished.”