After the last words were read, Waldemar stood a moment irresolute; then he lifted his head, his dark eyes bright and clear, his mouth fixed and firm, a proud calm displacing his old look of passion and of care.
He went up to his brother with a generous impulse, and held out his hand.
"Maximilian, from our boyhood you never liked me, and of late you have done me a great wrong; but I am willing to believe that you did it from a mistaken motive, and by me, at least, it shall never be recalled. My father, in his wish to make amends for the one harsh act of his life to me, has made a will which I know you consider unjust. I cannot dispute his last desire that I should inherit Fairlie, but I can do what I know he would sanction—divide with you the wealth his energy collected. Take the half of the property, as if he had left it to you, and over his grave let us forget the past!"
On the last day of the year, so eventful to them both, Falkenstein and Valérie drove through the park at Fairlie. The rôle of a country gentleman would have been the last into which Waldemar, with his independent opinions and fastidious intellect, would have sunk; but he was fond of the place from early associations, and he came down to take possession. The tenantry and servants welcomed him heartily, for they had often used to wish that the wild high-spirited child, who rode his Shetland over the country at a headlong pace, and if he sometimes teased their lives out, always gave them a kind word and merry laugh, had been the heir instead of the one to whom they applied the old proverb "still and ill."
The tenantry had been dismissed, the dinner finished, even the briarwood pipe smoked out, and in the wide Elizabethan window of the library Falkenstein stood, looking on the clear bright night, and watching the Old Year out.
"You sent the deed of gift to-day to Maximilian?" said Valérie, clasping both her hands on his arm.
"Yes. He does not take it very graciously; but perhaps we can hardly expect that from a man who has been disinherited. I question if I should accept it at all."
"But you could never have wronged another as he wronged you," cried Valérie. "Oh, Waldemar! I think I never realised fully, till the day you took your generous revenge, how noble, how good, how above all others you are."
He smiled, and put his hand on her lips.