But was Rose ever married in the end? some may ask; for such a girl could not be without offers, especially in India. We have only to add, that the once-gay and heedless Rose Trecarrel is unwedded still.
On many a grey earn and lofty and rugged headland in Cornwall were fires, lighted by the miners and peasantry but chiefly about Rhoscadzhel—beacons so bright in honour of the new lord and lady, that they shone far over land and sea, and in such numbers that the Guebres and fire-worshippers of old, could they have seen them, might have deemed that the adoration of the Fire-god was again in its glory, as when the Scilly Isles were consecrated to the sun; and Derrick Braddon, who, on the strength of recent changes, had installed himself as a species of deputy-governor or major-domo at Rhoscadzhel, had a deep carouse, in which he was fully assisted by Messrs. Jasper Funnel, old Boxer, and others of the plush-breeched and aiguilletted fraternity.
Meanwhile, those whose fortunes we have followed throughout the campaign of Western India and the retreat from Cabul were speeding homeward, and when from the coast of Orissa they saw the steamer awaiting them in the rough and dangerous roadstead of Balasore, where usually the Calcutta pilots leave the home-bound ships, they hailed the bright blue world of waters as an old friend; for, to our island-born, "the sea, the sea," is what it was to the returning Greeks of old Xenophon!
"Now, Mabel," said Waller, as with, a lorgnette in her pretty hand, she surveyed the roadstead—the plain gold hoop on that hand being in Bob Waller's eyes the most charming trinket there, "a few weeks more, and all these foreign seas and shores will be left far behind; we shall be home at our little place that looks from Cornwall on the apple-bowers of Devon. Ha! Trevelyan, you and I shall then each sit down under his own vine and fig-tree in peace, and enjoy a quiet weed, like the patriarch of old—if the said patriarch ever possessed one. What say you, my Lady Lamorna?" he added, as he assisted Sybil's light figure to spring from the handsome and well-hung carriage in which they had travelled from Calcutta.
Sybil only smiled, and looked joyously at the sea, as she threw up the white lace veil of her bridal bonnet; and Audley, too, was gazing on the sea.
"Waller, we have undergone much," said he—"days of danger, and nights of anguish, yet we have survived them all, and been true to the end, and in the past have fully realised the force of the maxim that—
'Come what come may,
Time and the Hour runs through the roughest day.'"
THE END.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS