"Can you forgive me, Rena, for having sprung this surprise upon you?" asked Herrick, drawing his young wife to his breast, and kissing away her tears. "Or do I seem to have been cruel? I feared your courage might fail if I told you what was coming: and I wanted to have you face to face with your sham father and that wicked witch yonder. I was prepared for her denial of the facts." "How did you make this discovery, Herrick?" "That is a long story, dearest. You shall know all about it by and by. And now, dear love, you are my very own. No tyrannical father can come between my orphan wife and me. We stand each alone, love, and all in all to each other." "I am content to be yours and yours only," she said, looking up at him with adoring eyes. "But I hope my--I hope Mr. Bosworth will forgive me some day." "Be sure he will, my pet, and that he loves you dearly at this moment, though he roars and blusters about hatred. All will come well, dearest, in the end." "And you have married a pauper, after all," said Irene. "I have married the girl I love, and that is enough for me," answered Herrick. "But it is not so clear to me but that I have married a fortune into the bargain. Wait and see, love; the end has not come yet. And now settle your hood and wrap your cloak round you, and we are off again for London." And thus, clinging to her husband's arm, she who had so long been called Irene Bosworth left the home that had seemed her birthplace. It had been a solitary joyless life which she had lived there, for the most part, yet she looked back at the old panelled hall with a sigh of regret, the instinctive yearning of an affectionate nature. "We are as unfettered as our first parents, Irene, and the world is before us," said Herrick gaily, as he lifted her into the coach. "Back to Kingston, my men," to the postillions. "We will stay at the inn there to-night, and go on to London to-morrow morning." * * * * * "Go," said the Squire to Bridget, when the door had closed upon his sometime daughter; "go about your business, woman, and consider yourself lucky if I do not send you to gaol." "You had better think twice of that, Squire," said Mrs. Layburne. "To have this business out before a magistrate might lead to the asking of strange questions." "Do you think _I_ care what questions they ask?" cried Bosworth scornfully. "Do you suppose I am such an arrant cur as to quail before my fellow-worms because I have lived my own life, crawled upon this earth after my _own_ fashion, and not wriggled in _their_ particular mode? No, Barbara Layburne, if I have been a profligate, I have at least been a bold sinner, and I have never feared the face of a man. Were not the grip of death upon you, madam, _you_ should answer to the law for the trick you have played me." "What if it was an accident?" asked Barbara; "both the children were so reduced by sickness out of their own likeness, that one might easily mistake one for another."