“Blessed be God! Oh, God is very good!” and he lay back and panted.
She laughed nervously. “Well, are you determined to make me ashamed? Am I to throw myself at your head, sir? Or perhaps you are going to refuse me, after all.”
“But why should I burden all the years of your life with the name of a fallen man? I am dying in disgrace, Glory.”
“No, but in honour—great, great honour! These few bad days will be forgotten soon, dearest—quite, quite forgotten. And in the future time people will come to me and say—girls, dearest, brave, brave girls, who are fighting the battle of life like men—they will come and say: 'And did you know him? Did you really, really know him?' And I will smile triumphantly and answer them 'Yes, for he loved me, and he is mine and I am his forever and forever!'”
“It would be beautiful! We could not come together in this world; but to be united for all eternity on the threshold of the next——”
“There! Say no more about it, for it's all arranged anyhow. The Father has been persuaded to read the service, and the Prime Minister is to bring the Archbishop's license, and it's to be to-day—this evening—and—and I'm not the first woman who has settled everything herself!”
Then she began to laugh, and he laughed with her, and they laughed together in spite of his weakness and pain. At the next moment she was gone like a gleam of sunshine before a cloud, and Mrs. Callender had come back to the bedside, tying up the strings of her old-fashioned bonnet.
“She's gold, laddie, that's what yon Glory is—just gold!”
“Aye, tried in the fire and tested,” he replied, and then the back of his head began to throb fiercely.
Glory had fled out of the room to cry, and Mrs. Callender joined her on the landing. “I maun awa', lassie. I'd like fine to stop wi' ye, but I can't. It minds me of the time my Alec left me, and that's forty lang years the day, but he seems to have been with me ever syne.”