"Unfeeling and inopportune—I—Miss Stuart—Emmy—"
"Miss Stuart has just been made my wedded wife; thus any remarks you have to make, sir, you will please address to me."
Louis started as if a scorpion had stung him, and his trembling hand sought the hilt of his sword; here the old minister addressed him kindly, imploringly, and the guests crowded between them, but he dashed them all aside and turned from the house, without a word or glance from Emmy. Poor Emmy! dismay had frozen her, and mute despair glared in her haggard yet still beautiful eyes.
"Half an hour earlier and I had saved her and saved myself!" exclaimed Charters, bitterly; "the half-hour I loitered in Strathearn!" for he had halted there to refresh his weary soldiers.
And now to explain this sudden reappearance.
Tempest-tossed and under jurymasts, after long beating against adverse winds, the transport, with the remnant of his regiment, had been driven to 37 and 40 degrees of north latitude, and was stranded on the small isles of Corvo and Flores, two of the most western and detached of the Azores. There they had been lingering among the Portuguese for seven months, unknown to and unheard of by our Government; and it was not until Charters, leaving Alaster Grant in command at Corvo, had visited Angra, the capital of the island, and urged the necessity of having his soldiers transmitted home, that he procured a ship at Ponta del Gada, the largest town of these islands, and sailing with the still reduced remnant of his corps—for many had perished with the foundered transport—he landed at Greenock, from whence he was ordered at once to join the 2nd battalion of the Black Watch, into which his soldiers had volunteered, and which, by a strange fatality, was quartered in Perth—the home of his Emmy, and the place where for five long years he had garnered up his thoughts and dearest hopes.
The reader may imagine the emotions of poor Emmy on finding that her lover lived, and that her heart was thus cruelly wrenched away from all it had treasured and cherished for years. Then, as if to aggravate her sorrow, our battalion marched the next day for foreign service, and Louis again embarked for America, the land of his toil, without relentless fate permitting Emmy to excuse or explain herself.
Douglas left the corps and took his wife to Paris, where he fell in a duel with a Jacobite refugee.
Emmy lived to be a very old woman, but she never smiled again.
Thus were two fond hearts separated for ever.