“Thank God, you have!” she said, with a shudder.  “Oh, if you only knew how I have prayed and hoped and thought!”

“And I had a promise, too,” I said; “will it be painful for you to keep it?”

“Painful, Justin?” she cried.  “You know I will gladly be your wife.”

I will not write of what happened then.  It is not for the eyes of the world to see.  Tears come into my eyes now as I remember how her new-found happiness lit up her eyes with joy, and how the colour came into her beautiful cheeks.  God alone knows how happy we were.  We had been kept asunder by a cruel hand, and had been brought together again by long and bitter struggles, struggles which would never have been but for the love of God and the love in our hearts.  Then, when our joy was fullest, a choir from a neighbouring church began to sing—­

“Christians, awake, salute the happy morn, Whereon the Saviour of mankind was born.”

It was indeed, a happy Christmas morn to us.  The darkness had rolled away, and the light of heaven shone upon us.

When I left shortly after, I asked whether I should come the next day, or rather when daylight came, and spend Christmas Day with her.

“You must not be later than nine o’clock,” she said, with a glad laugh, while my heart seemed ready to break for joy.

I have nearly told my story now; the loving work of months is almost at an end, and soon I must drop my pen.  I am very happy, happier than I ever hoped to be.  My new-found strength not only brought me freedom from my enemy, not only enabled me to accomplish my purpose, but gave me fuller and richer life.  Gertrude and I live under brighter skies than we should do had I not been led through so terrible an experience.  Thus the Eternal Goodness brings good out of evil.

Voltaire is on the Continent.  I do not think that he has ever returned to England; while his mother, who still lives the same kind of life as of yore, supplies him with money.  It appears that she has means which were unknown to her friends, and thus she keeps him supplied.  Of course the relationship between them explains their being in league in Yorkshire.  She was ever seeking to serve him then; she is still trying to do the same.  She never speaks to me.  But for me, she says, her son would have married Gertrude, and then she would have lived with her Herod, who would have been a country gentleman, not the poor outcast he is now.

Kaffar has gone back to Egypt.  He stayed in London a few days after the scene on Christmas Eve, and I gave him house-room in my old lodgings; but he tired of England, so I sent him back to Cairo.  I think he is a far better man than he was, but I am not at all sorry that he dislikes England.  He writes sometimes, but I never receive his letters without thinking of the terrible night on the Yorkshire moors—­of the dark waters, the red hand, and the terrible struggle.  Although I am now entirely free from any such influences, I cannot help fearfully wondering at the awful power one being can exert over another.  How an evil man could almost deplete me of my own self, and make me see according to his will and act according to his desires, is to me beyond explanation.  Truly does our greatest poet say—­