“Will you not come?” I urged.

“I—­,” she paused.  “I will go see my father,” she murmured, “but—­”

Suddenly she trembled and drew back; a step was in the hall, on the threshold, at her side; Mr. Blake had come to reclaim his bride.

“Mr. Blake!”

The word came from her in a low tone shaken with the concentrated anguish of many a month of longing and despair, but there was no invitation in its sound, and he who had held out his arms, stopped and surveying her with a certain deprecatory glance in his proud eye, said,

“You are right; I have first my acknowledgments to make and your forgiveness to ask before I can hope—­”

“No, no,” she broke in, “your coming here is enough, I request no more.  If you felt unkindly toward me—­”

“Unkindly?” A world of love thrilled in that word.  “Luttra, I am your husband and rejoice that I am so; it is to lay the devotion of my heart and life at your feet that I seek your presence this hour.  The year has taught me—­ah, what has not the year taught me of the worth of her I so recklessly threw from me on my wedding day.  Luttra,”—­he held out his hand—­“will you crown all your other acts of devotion with a pardon that will restore me to my manhood and that place in your esteem which I covet above every other earthly good?”

Her face which had been raised to his with that earnest look we knew so well, softened with an ineffable smile, but still she did not lay her hand in his.

“And you say this to me in the very hour of my father’s and brother’s arrest!  With the remembrance in your mind of their bound and abject forms lying before you guarded by police; knowing too, that they deserve their ignominy and the long imprisonment that awaits them?”

“No, I say it on the day of the discovery and the restoration of that wife for whom I have long searched, and to whom when found I have no word to give but welcome, welcome, welcome.”

With the same deep smile she bowed her head, “Now let come what will, I can never again be unhappy,” were the words I caught, uttered in the lowest of undertones.  But in another moment her head had regained its steady poise and a great change had passed over her manner.

“Mr. Blake,” said she, “you are good; how good, I alone can know and duly appreciate who have lived in your house this last year and seen with eyes that missed nothing, just what your surroundings are and have been from the earliest years of your proud life.  But goodness must not lead you into the committal of an act you must and will repent to your dying day; or if it does, I who have learned my duty in the school of adversity, must show the courage of two and forbid what every secret instinct of my soul declares to be only provocative of shame and sorrow.  You would take me to your heart as your wife; do you realize what that means?”

“I think I do,” was his earnest reply.  “Relief from heart-ache, Luttra.”