Either to allow a full explanation between two long-parted lovers, or to conceal his own emotion and get back his customary calm, our dear doctor had seen fit to step into the front-study for a few minutes, and he checked Mr. Burress, with his hand on the door-knob, with some very natural questions as to the mode and time of our meeting, and ended by requiring his presence at the slight collation he ordered at once.

The part the worthy apothecary had played in my closing adventure; the certainty that to his zeal and promptness I owed my immunity from further captivity—­for, had I walked around the square in the usual way, the men at watch from the carriage-windows must have espied and seized me—­or, had we loitered in the alley, and arrived a moment later at the central house of Kendrick Row, there is no doubt that they would have been there to await my arrival, nor could Mr. Burress have saved me from their clutches—­the whole thing seemed especially providential; but, as the efficient medium of each mercy, Napoleon B. Burress did, indeed, seem to all present crowned with a perfect nimbus of glory.  Dr. Pemberton led him back to my presence with his arm encircling his shoulder; Captain Wentworth shook his hand mutely but long, with his eyes dimmed with tears, and words that found imperfect utterance, at last compelling him to strange silence.

“I thank you, I bless you,” he said, at last.  “I do not hope to be able to return such services, but, what I can do, command.”

“And I to think that she was crazy all the time; escaped from the great asylum a mile away.  Sweetest creature, too, I ever saw in my life; and Caleb thought so, too.”

The speaker brushed a briny drop or two from his eyes with the back of his hand as he spoke; then, smiling archly, asked: 

“Can you forgive me, miss, for belying you so, even in thought?  You see, I have made a clean breast of it now; but such a pity!”

“Forgive you?” And I advanced toward him, and put both my hands in one of his large white extremities, and, before I knew what I was doing, I had stooped over and kissed it, and was bathing it with my tears.

“O miss! this is too much; it is, indeed!” said Napoleon B., blushing to the roots of his hair, and withdrawing his hand with a slightly-mortified air; “you nonplus me completely.”

“You see she was too much overcome, Mr. Burress, to speak otherwise than this,” said Wentworth, drawing me to his bosom.  “You must honor this expression of feeling as I do.”

“O sir! it is the greatest honor I ever received in my life; and she, poor thing, like Penelope, tangled up in a web so long, and free at last!  Well, it is a great joy to me to think I helped a little to cut the ropes.”

“Helped!  Why, I owe every thing to you.  Listen,” and then as briefly as I could I recounted the trials in store for me that very night—­the compulsory marriage, or the removal to the belfry-tower—­one or the other inevitable, and either of which must have made the proposed rescue of the following day, on the part of Captain Wentworth and his friends, in one sense or the other unavailing.  As the wife of Gregory, or as the prisoner of the turret, I should in one case have been morally, and in the other physically, dead or lost forever!