“Let us think of the arch plotters no more, my darling!” declared John Dinsmore, fondly clasping his beautiful, little bride the more closely in his arms, and covering her lovely, blushing, dimpled face with passionate kisses, while her white arms clung more tightly around his neck.
Never were two men more happy than were Jerry Gaines and Hazard Ballou over the happy ending of John Dinsmore’s trials and tribulations, and the joy he entered into at last, in being reunited with the bride he loved better than his own life.
“I shall never know how to do enough for you hereafter, boys!” he exclaimed that evening, holding the hands of each, while tears which were no disgrace to his noble manhood stood in his eyes.
“I am going to make you both acknowledge my true friendship in a very practical way. When I receive my share of the Dinsmore millions I am going to buy out a New York paper, and take you both in as equal partners.”
“Do you mean as artist and reporter, as we have been for years?” laughed Ballou.
“As equal partners in the enterprise,” repeated John, slowly and emphatically; and the day came, soon after, in which he kept his word; and to-day “The Trinity,” as they are still called, own and publish one of the most successful of all the great dailies in the great metropolis.
They are both constant visitors at John’s happy home, and at the end of John’s first happy year of married life, when the twin boys came, he named them after his tried and true friends, Jerry Gaines Dinsmore and Hazard Ballou Dinsmore, much to their delight. The handsome artist is still a bachelor, but at the end of the first year after John married, Jerry Gaines took to himself a bride. Guess who she was, reader mine? No less a person than Lucy Caldwell, the farmer’s daughter, whom he met while she was on a visit to Jess.
Queenie, the dashing, young widow, soon after wedded another aged man for his wealth, but she was not a happy woman, because, as she often said to herself, through her fickleness she had missed the one joy that makes life worth living—love.
She lived and died envying Jess, and the great love her husband lavished upon her, to the end of her life. And the only time her proud eyes ever shed a tear was when the thought crossed her mind:
“It might have been!”