“No, dear; you were not to blame.  You were true, candid, natural through it all.  Our betrothal, dear, was on your part the betrothal of friends.  You did not know your own heart then.  You went abroad with your grandparents, and, after two years of travel, you were thrown in the court circles of London, and exposed to all the splendors, temptations and fascinations of rank, culture and refinement, such as you had never met at home in your rural neighborhood.  You were caught, dazzled, bewildered.  You thought you loved the English duke who sought your hand—­”

“But I never did, Rule.  Oh, Heaven knows I never did.  It was all self-delusion,” broke in Corona.

“No; you never did.  I saw that in the first instant that I met your eyes in the log cabin up yonder.  You never did!  It was a self-delusion.  Yet you were under the influence of that self-delusion when I found you on our wedding evening in such a paroxysm of grief and despair that I—­astonished and amazed at what I saw—­shared your delusion and imagined that you loved this duke when you married me.  What could I do, my own dear Cora, for whom I would have lived or died at bidding—­what could I do but efface myself from your life?”

“Oh! you could have given me time—­time to recover from my mental illness, since I had done no evil willingly.  Since I had kept my troth as well as I could.  Since I had vowed to love and serve you all the days of my life.  You should have given me time, Rule, to recover my senses and keep my vow.”

“Yes; I should have done so!  But, you see, I did not know.  How could I know?  Oh, my dear Cora!  It cost me little to lay down all the honors I had won, for they were worthless to me if not shared by you, for whom they were won.  But it cost my life almost to resign you.  Mine was ’not the flight of a felon’ or a coward, but the retirement of one sick, sick unto death of the world and of all the glory of the world.  Some men in my case might have sought relief in death, but I—­I knew I must live until the Lord of life should himself relieve me of duty.  So I left the city on the night of my wedding day, the night also before my inauguration day.”

“Oh, Rule! and as if it required that supreme act of renunciation to tear the veil from my eyes and let me see you as you were, and see my own heart as it was—­from that hour I knew how much, how deeply, how eternally I loved you!” said Corona.

Rothsay raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.  Then he resumed: 

“I wrote two letters—­one to you, explaining my motives for leaving, and advising you not to repeat to any one the subject or substance of our last interview, lest it should be misunderstood or misrepresented, and should do you unmerited injury with an evil-thinking world—­”

“Yes, Rule.  See!  See!  I have that letter yet!” exclaimed Corona, hastily unbuttoning the front of her bodice and pulling up the little black silk bag which she wore next her heart, suspended from the silken cord around her neck, and taking from it the old, yellow, broken paper which contained the last lines he had written to her.