"Cannot you see what you will be to me," he said passionately. "It will be like reaching home after a weary exile; like finding a fountain of living waters after crossing a burning wilderness. I ought not to ask it of you, Phebe. But what man could doom himself to endless thirst and exile! If you love me so much that you do not see how unworthy I am of you, I cannot give you up again. You are all the world to me."
"But I am only Phebe Marlowe," she said, still doubtfully.
"And I am only Jean Merle," he replied.
Phebe walked down the old familiar lanes with Jean Merle, and returned to the moorlands alone whilst the sun was still above the horizon. But a soft west wind had risen, and the hazy heat was gone. She could see the sun sinking low behind Riversborough, and its tall spires glistened in the level rays, while the fine cloud of smoke hanging over it this summer evening was tinged with gold. Her future home lay there, under the shadow of those spires, and beneath the soft, floating veil ascending from a thousand hearths. The home Roland Sefton had forfeited and Felicita had forsaken had become hers. There was deep sadness mingled with the strange, unanticipated happiness of the present hour; and Phebe did not seek to put it away from her heart.
CHAPTER XXXI.
LAST WORDS.
Nothing could have delighted Mr. Clifford so much as a marriage between Jean Merle and Phebe Marlowe. The thought of it had more than once crossed his mind, but he had not dared to cherish it as a hope. When Jean Merle told him that night how Phebe had consented to become his wife, the old man's gladness knew no bounds.
"She is as dear to me as my own daughter," he said, in tremulous accents; "and now at last I shall have her under the same roof with me. I shall never be awake in the night again, fearing lest I should miss her on my death-bed. I should like Phebe to hold my hand in hers as long as I am conscious of anything in this world. All the remaining years of my life I shall have you and her with me as my children. God is very good to me."
But to Felix and Hilda it was a vexation and a surprise to hear that their Phebe Marlowe, so exclusively their own, was no longer to belong only to them. They could not tell, as none of us can tell with regard to our friends' marriages, what she could see in that man to make her willing to give herself to him. They never cordially forgave Jean Merle, though in the course of the following years he lavished upon them magnificent gifts. For once more he became a wealthy man, and stood high in the estimation of his fellow-townsmen. Upon his marriage with Phebe, at Mr. Clifford's request, he exchanged his foreign surname for the old English name of Marlowe, and was made the manager of the Old Bank. Some years later, when Mr. Clifford died, all his property, including his interest in the banking business, was left to John Marlowe.