She knew it was joy. In a lightning-flash of comprehension she realized that it was this awful calamity which had kept John silent, which had held him back from coming to her, from asking her to marry him. He loved her still! Love, dead and buried, had risen out of his grave. The impossible had happened. John loved her still.
"I cannot bear it," she said; and for a moment the long yellow waves, and her father's impatient voice, and even John's letter, were alike blotted out, unheard.
Colonel Tempest considered Di's apathy, after she had read the letter, unfeeling and unsympathetic in the extreme, and he did not hesitate to tell her so. But when she presently turned her averted face towards him he was already off on another tack, his excitement, which seemed to increase rather than diminish, tossing him as a wave tosses a spar.
"Twenty years," he said tremulously. "Think of it, Di—not that you seem to care! Twenty years have I toiled and moiled in poverty, twenty years have I and my children been ground down while that nameless interloper has spent our money right and left. Oh, my God! I've got it at last. I've got my own at last. But who will give me back those twenty years?" and Colonel Tempest's voice broke into a sob.
Other consequences of that letter began to dawn on Di's awakening consciousness.
"Then John," she said, bewildered. "Oh, father, what will become of John?"
"John," said Colonel Tempest, bitterly, "is now just where I was twenty years ago—disinherited, penniless. He has kept me out all these years, and now at last Providence gives me my own."
It is to be hoped that Providence is not really responsible for all the shady transactions for which we offer up our best thanks.
"I dare say he has put by," continued Colonel Tempest. "He has had time enough."
"You have not read the letter carefully," said Di. "He only discovered all this less than three months ago, and you have been ill for more than two."