John, with his stolen bride, hurriedly crossed the footbridge and ran to the men who were holding the horses.  There he placed Dorothy on her feet and said with a touch of anger:—­

“Will you mount of your own will or shall I put you in the saddle?”

“I’ll mount of my own will, John,” she replied submissively, “and John, I—­I thank you, I thank you for—­for—­” she stopped speaking and toyed with the tufts of fur that hung from the edges of her cloak.

“For what, my love?  For what do you thank me?” asked John after a little pause.

“For making—­me—­do—­what I—­I longed to do.  My conscience would not let me do it of my own free will.”

Then tears came from her eyes in a great flood, and throwing her arms about John’s neck she gave him herself and her heart to keep forever and forever.

And Leicester was shivering at the stile!  The girl had forgotten even the existence of the greatest lord in the realm.

My wife, Lord Rutland, and I waited in the watch-room above the castle gates for the coming of Dorothy and John; and when they came—­but I will not try to describe the scene.  It were a vain effort.  Tears and laughter well compounded make the sweetest joy; grief and joy the truest happiness; happiness and pain the grandest soul, and none of these may be described.  We may analyze them, and may take them part from part; but, like love, they cannot be compounded.  We may know all the component parts, but when we try to create these great emotions in description, we lack the subtle compounding flux to unite the ingredients, and after all is done, we have simply said that black is black and that white is white.

Next day, in the morning, Madge and I started for our new home in France.  We rode up the hill down which poor Dolcy took her last fatal plunge, and when we reached the crest, we paused to look back.  Standing on the battlements, waving a kerchief in farewell to us, was the golden-crowned form of a girl.  Soon she covered her face with her kerchief, and we knew she was weeping Then we, also, wept as we turned away from the fair picture; and since that far-off morning—­forty long, long years ago—­we have not seen the face nor heard the voice of our sweet, tender friend.  Forty years!  What an eternity it is if we tear it into minutes!

L’ENVOI

The fire ceases to burn; the flames are sucked back into the earth; the doe’s blood has boiled away; the caldron cools, and my shadowy friends—­so real to me—­whom I love with a passionate tenderness beyond my power to express, have sunk into the dread black bank of the past, and my poor, weak wand is powerless to recall them for the space of even one fleeting moment.  So I must say farewell to them; but all my life I shall carry a heart full of tender love and pain for the fairest, fiercest, gentlest, weakest, strongest of them all—­Dorothy Vernon.