'I wished to try you--to test you--to compel you to love me, and I have done so, have I not?' she asked, taking his face between her hands and gazing tenderly into his eyes. 'You know now what fettered my tongue,' said he, with a sigh. 'I knew you were in bondage--but it was in bondage to _me_. Your love for me was an insult to myself; your compliments and intentions in the present time, were an implied insult to my past. You dared to love me, knowing that you had a wife somewhere--where, you knew not; but you little thought that Mrs. Trelawney, the supposed widow of a mythical Trelawney, and Laura Dorillion were one and the same person. Now, is the situation dramatic? Do you remember that you told me that you loved me against your own will and conscience, and that my very _name_ of Laura repressed that love at times? Heavens, could you but know what I felt--how my heart was wrung--my woman's pride alternately roused and crushed by admissions such as these! I have suffered greatly, darling, but all is over now,' she added, laying her cheek on his breast, while his lips were pressed to her forehead. After a time, she spoke again. 'I knew not that you were in the Army, or were in life. I knew not of your existence till I met you suddenly at Aldershot, after I had lived years of seclusion in the Channel Isles. I thanked God for the discovery; I vowed to win you again, if I could, before I would reveal myself--and I have done so.' She whose love he had so longed and prayed for, and yet striven to root out of his heart, was now his own--his own after all; and all the pent-up love of lonely years had found reward at last. 'Often before I met you again--discovered you, and vowed to make you mine again, I had pondered that, but for Netty's sake, whether, taking it all in all, the good with the bad, life was worth living,' said she, her eyes full of tears now. 'And till now, Laura, my life has seemed a gloomy and empty one. I was often appalled by the aimlessness and isolation of it.' 'How strange it is that you never discovered me!' said Laura; 'yet I have seen your eyes wander more than once to this engagement ring.' 'And stranger still that when I heard you sing the old, old song that was once so familiar, making my heart thrill with troubled memories, no light came to me. Oh, Laura, you acted well your part to this joyous ending.' 'I told you that I had found the verses in an old album, where a friend wrote them years ago; that friend was yourself. You remember so lately telling me that I had ruined your life?' 'Yes, Laura, and your cruel smile.' 'God knows how at that moment I longed to cast myself on your breast, Anthony, as I do now, and barter all my past wrongs for a single kiss!' His Christian name again on her lips, as in the days of their boy and girl love, ere the black change came, and how strange, yet familiar--how sweet, how dear it sounded! 'How did you learn I was here with Goring?' he asked, tenderly.