CHAPTER LIV.
Banished every thought of sadness
In our home of quiet gladness;
Absence, separation o'er,
Together, and to part no more.
United, lovingly we glide,
Ever going with the tide.
Storm nor tempest fear we now,
Love sits watching at the prow;
Happy, trusting, silently,
Onward to the shoreless sea,
Together let us drift or glide,
Ever going with the tide.
ST. JAMES'S MAGAZINE.
"And you love me, dear Newton—and—and no one else?"
Soft autumn was in all her beauty; the forest leaves of Fife were already tinged with yellow; the harvest fields were bare, and the brown partridges were whirring up in tempting coveys from the hard stubble and the hedgerows, while the deep, fragrant clover grew green and rich on the upland slopes.
It was a glorious evening in September, when the days and nights are of equal length. The sun was setting beyond the western Lomond, and casting his dewy shadow far across the woodlands of Calderwood Glen, when Cora and I lingered, hand in hand, in the old avenue, and she asked this rather pleasing—I had almost said, perplexing—question, while her soft and beautiful eyes were turned tenderly upwards to mine.
And dearly I kissed her, for we had been but three days married—so Cora was my kismet, my destiny, after all!
I was lost for a moment in thought—even lance-prods and rifle bullets had not cured me of my habit of day-dreaming and memory flashed back to that strange episode in the quarters of the hakim Abd-el-Rasig at Varna, when poor Jack Studhome, Jules Jolicoeur, and Captain Baudeuf were with me, and the words of the conjuring Egyptian quack doctor seemed to come to my ears again—"Allah kerim—it is kismet—your destiny."
Cora repeated her winning question.
"And you love me, dear Newton—and no one else?"
"Could I fail to love you, Cora—you, who are all affection and perfection, too?"