"This is an intricate question; but I am the last man to dispute its consequence. However, happy is the prince whose throne is so well founded, that it may be disputed whether it rests most on his birth-right, or his people's will!"
With this remark he quitted the room; and, leaving all other thoughts but those of love and gratitude behind him, hastened to the suite of chambers, where he hoped to find her whose arms had never closed on him, till she thought he could receive no other comforter.
Louis had left the room in the midst of Mr. Stanhope's conversation with his friend, to relieve the suffering groupe above stairs, of the alarm which he guessed had caused the insensibility of his cousin. Wharton met him at the door of Cornelia's chamber, where she was resting from the awful interchanges of her feelings, on the breast of her mother. Louis pressed the hand of his friend as he passed him.
"You will find her," said he, "all your own!"
But in this, even her cousin, who best knew the movements of her soul, was mistaken.
Cornelia suffered the grateful, the happy Wharton, to fold her to his heart, in the sacred emotion of a meeting, redeemed as from the grave; for, when they parted a few minutes before, the scaffold appeared to each, the scene of their next separation; and the world to come, where they could only meet again! But Cornelia remained firm to her first resolution. "In Heaven's eye," cried she, "I believe you are as pure as in mine. But the World must be convinced of the same. Your happiness, as well as mine, compels the sacrifice; and, dearest Wharton, it shall be made! Another year, and instead of my going to seek my affianced husband in a foreign land, he will come to claim me in the hall of my fathers!"
Mr. Stanhope did not pass that day only, with the Pastor and his interesting household; he remained to witness the most heart-felt ceremony that ever took place in the little humble church that succeeded the once magnificent abbey of Lindisfarne.
The double marriages of their beloved Louis and Alice were to be solemnized there; and every fisherman's hut sent forth its inmates to honour the holy ceremony.
The stars of many orders might have glared on the noble breast of Wharton, as he followed the happy groupe under the rustic archway; but he chose only the badge of the garter. It was bestowed on him by James Stuart, when three of the greatest kings in Europe, signed the league for his support; and it was the Duke's pride, doubly to acknowledge the hand that bestowed it, by wearing it now, in the utter despair of his fortunes.
Louis, looked so like his former self, in the brightness of unclouded happiness, that every lip moved in rapturous blessings as he passed; and so great was the acclaim of the honest fishermen, around this their often venturous companion, and ever darling master; that no sense was left unoccupied, to bestow a glance on the waving plumes of Ferdinand, though many a benizon followed the down-cast looks of his blushing Alice.