"Thank God!" she said, in her sweet, clear voice, with a sound of tears in its sweetness. "Thank God, my mother was pure and innocent! The dream of my life-time is fulfilled at last." "Does the grave give up its dead?" they cried, and Bertram Chesleigh went to her side and touched her white hand, half-fearfully. "My wife," he said. "Yes, your wife," she answered, lifting her violet eyes to his face with such deep reproach in their tragic depths, that he was awed into momentary silence. Then she turned from him, and went to her grandfather, who was gazing at her with dazed eyes full of grief and dread. She put her arms around his neck, and kissed his poor, withered cheek with her sweet, quivering lips. "Grandpa, you must not take me for a ghost," she said. "It is your own little Golden come back to live and love you again. I was not dead, after all. Did I not tell you I could not die yet? But I cannot tell you all the story of my rescue from the grave now. Let us give all our thoughts to our martyred dead." She looked up and saw her father and old Dinah waiting to greet her. It was a strange scene beside that flower-wreathed coffin. There was passionate joy over the living girl, and bitter sorrow over the dead. Mrs. Leith had beckoned Bertram Chesleigh away. Behind the heavy hangings of the bay-window she said to him, gently: "Do not press your wife yet, Mr. Chesleigh. Remember you have wronged her deeply, and she does not yet know how you have repented and atoned." "I can never atone," he said, heavily. "Perhaps she may think differently when she knows all," said Mrs. Leith. "Women are very tender and forgiving, you know." "If she never speaks to me again, I shall still rejoice that she is living," he said, with a beam of gladness in his large, black eyes. "Do you wonder how she was saved?" she inquired. "Yes." "I will tell you, then, briefly," she answered. "You remember how you bribed the grave-digger to open her coffin for you that night?" "Yes, and then I was too ill to keep my appointment," he answered. "That wild fancy of yours was the means of her rescue," said Mrs. Leith. "When the man opened the coffin to be in readiness for you, he discovered slight signs of life in Golden. Growing alarmed and impatient at your tardiness, he sent his son to look for you, and the youth encountered me. I went with him, and we removed her to the man's little cottage near by. Little by little we fed the signs of reviving life, and you see the result." "For which I bless and thank you forever," he said, kissing her hand respectfully.