Another hour found him by the side of Aurelia, and to attempt to record all the explanations and loving incoherences, astonishment and joy of that particular interview would be a difficult task indeed; but even while speaking to her, and while her voice was in his ear, Roland seemed to see before him the cabinet of Scindia, with the now baffled secret it contained.
If Roland had now, in a modified sense, to blush at, and feel shame, for his father's duplicity in the matter of the will—a duplicity born of the various emotions we have already described, dislike between brothers, temptation offered on one hand, the dread of losing the ambitious girl he loved on the other—and then the total disappearance of Philip, he had to blush before one who had accepted him as a husband when their positions were very different, when all the odds of wealth and landed property were, as once again, in her favour, and he was still the penniless soldier with his sword alone.
And Roland, as he looked on Aurelia again, recalled the youthful portrait of his lost uncle Philip at Ardgowrie, and saw, or thought he saw, how closely she resembled it.
We have little more to add.
The Darnel estates, we have said, were ruined; but Ardgowrie was yet in all its baronial glory; to Ardgowrie they would go, and sell the former, so it was all settled ere the Canadian summer came swiftly on; thus the reader may be assured that they were married long before the month of August, so old Elspat Gorm's "fatal day" of the Ruthvens was fully evaded. Nor need we add, though we do so, that jolly Hector Logan was groomsman, and old General Colborne gave the bride away.
In winning Aurelia, Poland regained his inheritance, but he never left the old Royal Regiment, or returned finally to Ardgowrie, till he had, like his father before him, been long a popular colonel of the corps.
THE SECRET MARRIAGE.
In famous old Cornwall, known as "the Land of Tin," in the days of Solomon—the land of Druid Cromlechs and Celtic circles, of those mysterious sarcophagi named Kistvaens, wherein lie the bones of a race unknown—the land of many wondrous relics of a vanished past, lies the scene of the following events.
Not far from that part of the coast which is washed by the British Channel stands Restormel Court, at the time of our story—a few years ago—the seat of Sir Launcelot Tredegarth Tresilian, Bart., a proud old gentleman, whose chief, if not only failing was an inordinate pride of family; and hence whose principal regret was, that though he had heirs to succeed him in his estate, there was none to follow him in his title, which had been bestowed upon him by the late King William IV. for certain political services. His two sons had been killed in the service of the country. One had fallen in Central India and the other in the Crimea, and as the baronetcy was limited by diploma "to the heirs male of his own body," he had to rest him content with the knowledge that he was the first and last baronet of Restormel Court.