She had dried her tears. Her heart was welling over with gladness and love for this sinner, still kneeling by her side as she sat on the ferny river bank, in the brightening moonlight, holding both her hands in his, looking up pleadingly as he made his prayer. There was no thought of denying him in her mind. She only wanted to yield with good grace, not to humiliate herself too deeply.
“It must be as you wish,” she said. “When you have arranged this second marriage you can write to me and tell me where and when it is to be. I will come to the place you appoint with my maid. She is a good girl, and I can trust her. She can be one of the witnesses of our wedding.”
“Are you sure she will not talk about it afterwards?”
“I have proved her already, and I know she is trustworthy.”
“Be it so, love. See here.” He took a Cornish guide book from his pocket, and opened it at the map of the county. “I have been thinking that we might go farther west, to some remote parish. Here is Camelot, for instance. I never heard of anyone living at Camelot, or going to Camelot, since the time of King Arthur. Surely there we should be safe from observation. The guide book acknowledges that there is nothing particular to be seen at Camelot. It has not even a good word for the inns. The place is miles away from everything. It is an anomaly in towns, for though it has a town hall and a market place, it has no church that it can call its own, but hooks itself on to a brace of outlying churches, each a mile and a half away. Let us be married at one of those out-of-the-way churches, Laura, and I shall love Camelot all the days of my life, as one loves the plain face of a friend who has done one a great service.”
Laura had nothing to say against Camelot; so it was finally resolved that John Treverton should get there as quickly as rail and coach would carry him, and that he should have the banns put up at one of the churches, and that he should meet Laura at Didford Junction three weeks from that day, and escort her by coach across the wild moors and under the shadow of giant brown tors, to the little town of Camelot, where a modest population of six or seven hundred souls seemed to have lost themselves among the hills, and got somehow left behind in the march of time and progress.
John Treverton and his wife lingered for a long time beside the brawling river, walking arm in arm along the narrow woodland path, half in moonshine half in shadow, talking of the future; both supremely happy, and one of them, at least, tasting pure and perfect happiness for the first time in his life.
“Shall we go to Penzance after our wedding, love, and then cross to the Scilly Isles for our honeymoon? It will be so sweet to inhabit a little rockbound world of our own, circled by the Atlantic.”
Laura assented that it would be sweet. Her world was henceforth to be small, John Treverton its sun and centre, and all things outside him and beyond him a mere elementary universe.
He looked at his watch presently when they came out of the pinewood into the broad moonlight.
“By Jove, dearest, I shall have no more than time to see you as far as the orchard gate, and then run off to catch the last train for Didford. I shall sleep at the hotel there, tonight. I don’t want to be seen within twenty miles of Hazlehurst till you and I come back from the Scilly Isles, sunburnt and happy, to take up our abode at the dear old Manor House. Oh, Laura, how I shall love that good, honest, respectable old home; how earnestly I shall thank God night and morning for my blissful life. Ah, love, you can never fully understand what a kicked-about waif I have been for the last seven years of my worthless existence. You can never fully know how thrice blessed is a tranquil haven after stormy seas.”
They had opened their hearts and minds fully to each other in that long talk beside the river; she withholding nothing, he entering into no details of his life-history, but frankly admitting his unworthiness. She told him how she had borne her life at Hazlehurst after her solitary return from a supposed honeymoon; how she had hidden the truth from all her little world. It would seem the most natural thing for her to go away to meet her husband on his return from abroad, and then for them both to come home together.
They parted at the orchard gate hurriedly, for John had three miles to walk to the station, and only three-quarters of an hour for the walk. There was but one hasty kiss at parting, but, oh, the blissfulness of such a kiss on the threshold of so fair a future! Laura threaded her way slowly through the moonlit orchard, where the old apple trees cast their crooked shadows on the soft deep turf, and happy tears poured down her flushed cheeks as she went.
“God is good to us, God is very good,” she kept repeating inwardly. “Oh, how can we ever be grateful enough, how can we ever be earnest enough in doing our duty?”
In all her talk with John Treverton she had not said a word about the settlement. She had not praised him or thanked him for his generosity. All thought of Jasper Treverton’s fortune was as remote from her mind as if the old man had died a pauper, and there had been
