“It is very wonderful,” she said at last.  “Wonderful ... that you can care for me....  Oh, if I had known how noble you were, I should have told you all at once.”

“Perhaps I should have been as ignoble as ever,” said Stangrave, “if that young English Viscount had not put me on my mettle by his own nobleness.”

“No! no!  Do not belie yourself.  You know what he does not;—­what I would have died sooner than tell him.”

Stangrave drew the arm closer through his, and clasped the hand.  Marie did not withdraw it.

“Wonderful, wonderful love!” she said quite humbly.  Her theatric passionateness had passed;—­

  “Nothing was left of her,
  Now, but pure womanly.”

“That you can love me—­me, the slave; me, the scourged; the scarred—­Oh Stangrave! it is not much—­not much really;—­only a little mark or two....”

“I will prize them,” he answered, smiling through tears, “more than all your loveliness.  I will see in them God’s commandment to me, written not on tables of stone, but on fair, pure, noble flesh.  My Marie!  You shall have cause even to rejoice in them!”

“I glory in them now; for, without them, I never should have known all your worth.”

The next day Stangrave, Marie, and Sabina were hurrying home to England! while Tom Thurnall was hurrying to Marseilles, to vanish Eastward Ho.

He has escaped once more:  but his heart is hardened still.  What will his fall be like?

CHAPTER XXVIII.

LAST CHRISTMAS EVE.

And now two years and more are past and gone; and all whose lot it was have come Westward Ho once more, sadder and wiser men to their lives’ end; save one or two, that is, from whom not even Solomon’s pestle and mortar discipline would pound out the innate folly.

Frank has come home stouter and browner, as well as heartier and wiser, than he went forth.  He is Valencia’s husband now, and rector, not curate, of Aberalva town; and Valencia makes him a noble rector’s wife.

She, too, has had her sad experiences;—­of more than absent love; for when the news of Inkerman arrived, she was sitting by Lucia’s death-bed; and when the ghastly list came home, and with it the news of Scoutbush “severely wounded by a musket-ball,” she had just taken her last look of the fair face, and seen in fancy the fair spirit greeting in the eternal world the soul of him whom she loved unto the death.  She had hurried out to Scutari, to nurse her brother; had seen there many a sight—­she best knows what she saw.  She sent Scoutbush back to the Crimea, to try his chance once more; and then came home to be a mother to those three orphan children, from whom she vowed never to part.  So the children went with Frank and her to Aberalva, and Valencia had learnt half a mother’s duties, ere she had a baby of her own.

And thus to her, as to all hearts, has the war brought a discipline from heaven.