Colonel Schuyler was astonished, and could hardly believe that it was Christine Rossiter speaking to him, as this woman spoke, and actually pleading Gertie’s cause, and advising him to accept her as the wife of his son. In spite of Miss Rossiter’s talk of adoption and heirship, he felt a pang of regret when he remembered the Creighton line of ancestry, almost as pure as his own, and thought of Jenny Nesbitt, who seemed destined to be connected with him in so many ways through Edith and Emma and Godfrey. But there was no help for it. The star of the Lyles was in the ascendant, and when, that afternoon, Godfrey went up to see Gertie for the first time since her return to consciousness, he had his father’s full consent to claim her for his wife. The colonel himself had told Godfrey the story of Gertie’s birth, and Godfrey had _hurrahed_ for very joy, feeling that in some way Gertie was thus brought nearer to him. He knew of her coming alone to him in his illness and braving the world because she thought herself his sister. He had faint reminiscences, too, of soft hands which cooled his burning brow, of loving words breathed into his ear, and of firm, though gentle remonstrances and threats of leaving him, when the vessel plunged so fearfully and he was plunging with it. Gertie had saved his life, and even when he did not know she was in the room she had been constantly in his mind, and was with him in his desperate voyage over the stormy sea, where he had so nearly been lost. Always, when the waves were doing their worst, there was a thought in his heart of _La Sœur_, and he wondered how she was coming through, and if the window was open in her dingy little stateroom. Hers was the first name upon his lips when he awoke to consciousness; and before he was really able he left his room and went to Miss Rossiter’s, to be near his darling and see her when he chose. But she had never known him when he bent over her with fond words and loving caresses; and she talked of him to his face, and mourned sadly that he was lost, and she was left to sail alone over the troubled waters. “I am here, Gertie. I shall never leave you again,” he had said to her once, when she could not understand his meaning, and now he was going to say it again, with every obstacle cleared from his path, and nothing to impede his love. Gertie was sitting up and expecting him, but she was not prepared for the impetuosity with which he gathered her in his arms, and hugging her so close that her breath came in quick gasps, carried her to the mirror, and laying her white, thin face beside his own, which, if possible, was whiter and thinner, bade her see what a “pair of picked chickens they were.” “But we weathered it, Gertie,” he said, “and now we’ve nothing to do but grow strong and well again, and you will be more beautiful than ever, while I,—well, Gertie, I never was so happy in my life as at this moment when I hold you thus and kiss you, so—and so!”