"From the despair of my jealous love and misery, I wakened to passionate bliss," he continued. "I know not when the child's first shyness and dread of me changed to a tenderer feeling, but it came upon me suddenly, and with heavenly sweetness, that she loved me. She had forgotten her lover in New York. Mrs. Lynn, I swear I believed she loved me even as I loved her, with a singleness and depth of devotion such as few hearts are capable of feeling. God forgive me that I doubted her once! No one was ever more cruelly punished for unbelief and hardness than I have been!"
With his eyes downcast upon that low, green grave, he did not see how bitterly her lip curled as it always did when that night of her betrayal rushed bleakly over her.
"She gave me her tender, trusting heart, and her beautiful self," he went on. "We were married. Her parents were absent, and it was a very quiet ceremony in a quiet church that gave me the desire of my heart. We went abroad for our honeymoon, and remained more than a year."
A sigh, heavy with his heart's despair, drifted over his lips.
"Such a year, Mrs. Lynn!—a golden year, into whose short space was crowded all the real happiness and bliss of my life. She made me the happiest, most blessed of men in that brief time. I am forty-four years old, Mrs. Lynn, but, it seems to me I have only really lived one year—one year that shines on me from the past like a radiant star in the darkness of night."
[CHAPTER LV.]
Laurel felt a dreary kind of pleasure in hearing her husband ascribe to her the only real happiness of his life. It was some atonement for all that she had borne, all that she had suffered. Her heart beat quick and fast beneath her white robe. He went on sadly:
"Never was there a stormier ending to a beautiful, sunny, summer day, never a sadder waking from a happy dream. And it was all so swift and sudden. It was like Burns' poem.