"You love me, Vane," she murmurs, softly and half-incredulously, "and yet I thought, I feared——"
"You feared what?" he asks, breaking in upon her shy pause.
"That you loved Maud best," she answers. "When I came up the path and saw you two together, I crept behind the tree and listened. If I had learned then that she was the desire of your heart, I should have crept away quietly to die of my sorrow, I should not have come between you and your love. You never should have known."
"But since you found me faithful to your memory, Reine, you will forgive all the past, will you not, my darling?" he pleads.
"Freely," she answers, with a smile that is all the brighter because it breaks through tears.
"And now," he says, drawing her down to a seat beside him on the bench beneath the tree, "now, dear, you will tell me all your story. Where have you been through all the long months in which I mourned you as dead?"
Resting in his arms she tells him the story of those long months of sorrow while she believed him dead, sobbing even now in the deep, sweet gladness that has come to her so suddenly, over the remembrance of her despair.
"I knew no better until I reached the village yonder, seeking Maud," she concludes. "There I learned the whole truth, that you lived, and were again the betrothed of my cousin. I came here to have one secret, farewell look at you, my husband, to go away and leave you to your love and your happiness. But I heard all you said, and I could not give you up to Maud's selfish claim after that."
"I thank God that I have found you again, my precious wife. We shall never be parted any more," he answers, earnestly.
"You have not told me how you were saved that night after you sprang from the life-boat in which I last saw you," the young wife says after a little, lifting to his her shy, yet radiant eyes.