“I have always pitied you,” she murmured.
“I thought you dead. I saw your poor mutilated drowned body in my dreams. Day and night it haunted me. I was nearly beside myself. I thought I should go mad. My father’s mind was set upon my marriage with a great Kentish heiress who loved another than me. I appealed to her to save me—to save me from my anguish, torture and remorse, produced by continual thoughts of you! I had no heart to give her. I was base and unmanly in offering her the dregs of the cup that had been filled for you; but oh, Lally, I was half mad and wholly despairing! I wanted the love of some good woman to interpose and save me from going to perdition.”
“I heard your offer of marriage to her,” said Lally. “And you are engaged to marry her?”
“No; she refused me. I am free, Lally, and I thank God for it. What should I have done if I had married her and then discovered that you still live? I love you and you alone in the whole world. I am of age and my own master. I have thrown off the shackles my father has kept upon me. I mean to be brave and honest and true henceforward, so help me God! I mean to be a man, Lally, in the best and noblest sense of the word. It shall never be said again of me that I am ‘unstable as water,’ or that I am a coward. Lally, I offer you a second marriage, which no one can contest. Will you forgive me, and take me back?”
His words found echo in Lally’s heart, but she did not speak. Her pallor gave place to a sudden rose stain, and she began to tremble.
“I came to-day to entreat Miss Wroat to intercede with you for me,” said Rufus, becoming alarmed at her silence. “I have not a fine home to offer you, such as Miss Wroat gives you, but I will work for you, Lally. I will make myself a great painter for your sake. Those worthless daubs I painted at New Brompton belong to the past life. Henceforward I will paint better pictures, and show that there is something in me. We will have two cosy rooms somewhere in the London suburbs, and you shall have a sunny window for flowers, and I will work for you, and you shall never know want or misery again. I can do anything with and for you, Lally, but if left to stand by myself I shall surely fall. Lally, little wife, take me back!”
He crept up nearer to her and held out his arms.
She crept in to them like a weary child.
She might justly have reproached him for his weakness and cowardice, and have taunted him with having courted the heiress of Hawkhurst, but she did neither. She nestled in his arms, and looked up at him with great tender eyes full of a sweet compassion and love and offered him her lips to kiss!
And so they were reunited.