But, though it was not long before the young stranger's first
astonishment at the institutions of the new world had passed into
enthusiastic admiration and he was ready to admit that the race had for
the first time learned how to live, he presently began to repine at a
fate which had introduced him to the new world, only to leave him
oppressed by a sense of hopeless loneliness which all the kindness of his
new friends could not relieve, feeling, as he must, that it was dictated
by pity only. Then it was that he first learned that his experience had
been a yet more marvelous one than he had supposed. Edith Leete was no
other than the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, his betrothed, who,
after long mourning her lost lover, had at last allowed herself to be
consoled. The story of the tragical bereavement which had shadowed her
early life was a family tradition, and among the family heirlooms were
letters from Julian West, together with a photograph which represented so
handsome a youth that Edith was illogically inclined to quarrel with her
great-grandmother for ever marrying anybody else. As for the young man's
picture, she kept it on her dressing table. Of course, it followed that
the identity of the tenant of the subterranean chamber had been fully
known to his rescuers from the moment of the discovery; but Edith, for
reasons of her own, had insisted that he should not know who she was till
she saw fit to tell him. When, at the proper time, she had seen fit to do
this, there was no further question of loneliness for the young man, for
how could destiny more unmistakably have indicated that two persons were
meant for each other?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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