Calm speech and connected utterance came now to both, and many mutual explanations were made, and mutual tender assurances given more than once; for both had much to relate and to hear; nor with both—Alison especially—without false impressions that required removal.
'And you were actually in Antwerp too!' exclaimed Alison, when she heard his story.
'I traced you there, only to lose you again—though many times I must have passed the door of the very place where you lay ill. Oh, my darling, what you must have endured!'
Her transitory emotions of gratitude to Cadbury for his supposed birthday gift made Goring laugh again when he saw her wonder and joy that it had come from himself, and that she learned the erector of the marble cross was himself also. Thus, when Bevil felt her tears and kisses on his cheek, he thought that never were gifts so pleasantly repaid. With Alison, it would all be rest hereafter. 'Trials and troubles might come,' as a writer has it; though further trials and troubles seemed at a low computation just then; 'but nothing would tear her great tree up by the roots again.'
Alison felt just a little emotion of shame, and that she kept to herself. He had never, even for an instant, doubted her love (though he had feared her father's influence), but she had not been without twinges of doubt, especially after the day of the Four-in-Hand meeting by the Serpentine.
'How trivial, at first, seem the events that rule our lives—that shape our destinies—our future,' said Goring. 'Had I not, by the merest chance, met poor old Archie, heaven alone knows when I might have traced you.'
Hour after hour passed by, and she forgot all about the vicar, and even of where they were.
She would recal the past time at Chilcote, when the first vague emotion of happiness in his presence and his society—pleasure that was almost, strange to say, a kind of sweet pain—stole over her; when she was half-afraid to meet his eye, and when each stolen glance at the other led to much secret perturbation of spirit, and when a touch of the hand seemed to reveal something that was new, as the glamour of a first love stole into the hearts of both.
How long, long ago, seemed that day on which they rode with the buckhounds, and took their fences together side by side.
We have not much more to relate, as in a little time they were to glide pleasantly away into the unnoticed mass of married folks; yet to Alison it would be always delightful to think that she had, at her will and bidding, a fine manly fellow like Bevil Goring—one whom brave men had been proud to follow—for she had a keen appreciation of soldierly renown; and he had more than a paragraph to his name in the Annual Army List.