“I—have been waiting,” she then said, and striving to hold her lips from trembling, she let two great tears trickle slowly across her face as she still looked up in his eyes.
There was nothing he could say. He read her whole story of faithfulness and of suffering, her epic of a love that could not die, in that one long look. Slowly he went up to her and taking her face in his hands he kissed away the tears from her cheeks. He put her head gently against his breast and let her cry.
She still held to the fence, as if she dared not too suddenly lean on his love, without which she had learned to live so long. But gradually, as he held her there, saying nothing, but softly kissing her hair and the one little hand he had taken in his own, her arms crept upward about his shoulders and her heart beat against his, in a peace surpassing anything of earth.
“My Garde,” he finally began to whisper, over and over again, “my own Garde—my darling, precious Garde.”
“Oh, this may all be wrong, Adam,” she answered him, after a time. “I don’t understand it. We don’t know what has happened, in all these years. Oh, how did you happen to come?”
“You drew me, sweetheart,” he said, in a voice made tremulous with emotion. “I have had no peace till now. I have loved you so! I have dreamed of you so! But I never knew—till to-night, when I got your letter.”
“You—never got it till to-night? Oh Adam,” she said. “Oh, Adam, I have been so punished for the wrong I did. Oh, you can never, never forgive me!”
“There, there, sweetheart,” he said to her soothingly, letting her cry out the sobs she had stifled so vainly. “Forgive you, dear? You had no need to ask for forgiveness—you who came to me there in that jail—you, whose sweet little motherly spirit so provided for my poor old beef-eaters, when they were hungry and fleeing for their lives. Dearest, I don’t see how you did it, when I was a hunted renegade, a fugitive, with doubled infamies piled upon my head. Oh, forgive me, dear, that ever I doubted my own little mate.”
“No, I should never have believed them—not all the world!” she protested. “My Adam. My Adam.”
With his strong arm about her, and her head leaned in confidence and love on his shoulder, he led her back to the garden, at once the scene of their joys and tragedies.