“Oh, Salome, do not leave me,” he answered; and his voice, weakened from his injuries and tender with the passion which, at last, he had not been afraid to declare, was like music to her heart.
She bent her blushing face upon the pillow beside him. “May I stay and take care of you?” she asked, softly.
“May you? Oh, Salome!”
Another silence fell between them. Both hearts were too full for words.
“Then we must be married to-day.” Salome had waited a little for him to say it; but, manlike, he had not been thinking of the proprieties.
“I cannot leave you to hired nurses now,” she murmured. “So, there is only this one way out of it.”
“And a blessed way it is.”
And so they were married, that bright May morning, amid scenes of anguish, and while Villard still hovered near the gates of death. And for weeks they remained at “Jones’s Tavern,” he ill, wretched, racked with pain; she, bearing the trials and discomforts of the place, vigils of long night-watches, the dull, dragging anxiety; and yet, there was never a happier or more blessed honeymoon.
When he was able to be moved on a stretcher, he was taken to Shepardtown. Their home-coming was a glad one, although it was necessarily quiet. Every operative in the mills had been at the station, when the train that bore the two who had done so much for them came steaming in. Salome nodded to many of them, with moist but happy eyes. But the family physician, who had met them in Boston, would allow of no hand-shaking.
“Time enough for that by and by,” he told the men who stood foremost in the crowd. “Do you want to kill him?”