'From the very gates of death, dearest Laura.' 'Oh, what should I have done if you had perished, my darling?--oh, my darling,' she said, in a low voice of exquisite tenderness as he embraced Netty--Antoinette so named after himself, and grown up to girlhood without his knowledge of her existence. 'Bravo,' cried a hearty voice familiar to them all; 'as Albert Smith used to say, "_C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour, qui fait le monde go round, O._" Thank God I see you and Old England again, Laura,' and Jerry Wilmot kissed her with hearty goodwill. Like Dalton, Jerry was very pale and wan; but not so feeble as the former--and from the effects of his wounds and fever could scarcely stand, even yet. The ovation that followed the landing of the Rifles may be fresh in the recollection of many. Balls, banquets, and addresses were amply accorded to all the returned troops, and decorations and crosses for valour were fully bestowed; but of all the joyous entertainments Bevil Goring saw nothing, as a notice which he read by chance in a paper led him to leave Portsmouth on the evening of the very day the regiment landed. It was simply a paragraph in a Southampton paper, on which his eye fell casually, that rooted him for a few minutes to the spot, and ran thus: 'We understand that the late Sir Ranald Cheyne, Bart., of Essilmont and that ilk, whose demise at Chilcote we recorded some days ago, has died without heirs male, and his baronetcy, one of the oldest in Scotland, has thus become extinct.' 'Who died some days ago at Chilcote,' thought Goring, who felt a species of shock; 'and Alison is thus alone--alone in the world--poor girl! At Cadbury's mercy perhaps--while I--oh, what must she think of me? Why do I only hear of this calamity now?' So next noon betimes saw him arrive at Chilcote with his horse at a rasping gallop, and his heart beating high with mingled hope, love, and great commiseration, as he knew how Alison idolised the querulous old man she had lost; and again, as before, his spirit sank on finding only silence and desolation--the house abandoned and all its windows shuttered. 'Desolation, as before,' he muttered, as he leaped from his horse; 'desolation, and perhaps mystery too. Where can she have gone, and with whom?' He passed the gate, and mechanically handled the door-knocker, and the sound thereof echoed hollowly through the silent house. He drew close to the shuttered windows, and peeped in through a fissure in one. He saw the almost entirely darkened dining-room, from the walls of which the portraits of the two cavalier brothers were still looking grimly and stonily down; on the table was a vase, with a few flowers still in it; and near stood a chair and a work-basket, in which some coloured wools were lying. Very recently must Alison have been there, as the flowers seemed still somewhat fresh; in fact, she had only set out on her pilgrimage the day before, when he had been at Portsmouth.