So Emilio Carpeggio went and prospered, while Kate remained a beauty and a moderate heiress (she had half of her mother’s small fortune), courted and loved, and going through the weary old treadmill of London seasons and country “parties.” People wondered why she did not marry. Her sister did, and made a love-match, though there was no violent obstacle in the way, and the lover was perfectly acceptable as to station and fortune. She was lucky, also, in loving a man who had some brains to boast of. This unknown brother-in-law in after-times became a powerful lever in favor of Carpeggio’s suit; but long before the young engineer came back the kind, tender-hearted old marquis had found out his daughter’s secret, and after some time overcame his natural prejudices, and as generously agreed to Kate’s hopes as he had before vigorously opposed them. And yet all this was done while hardly a word was spoken; for if any courtship was emphatically a silent one, it was this. Everything came to be tacitly understood, and a few hand-pressures, a kiss, a smile, or a long look expressed the changes and chances of this simple love-story. At the end of three years the young man came home on a holiday, which he meant to employ in determining his fate. He had promised the new company to go back permanently and take charge of their interests as a resident, and many of the native members had shown themselves willing and eager to make him a countryman and a son-in-law. He went home, and saw the marquis the first evening of his stay, two hours after he got off the train. To his surprise, he found his request granted before he made it and his road made plain before him. The old man did not even ask him not to return to America. It is of little use to descant on his meeting with Kate and on his (literally) first spoken words of love. They told each other the truth—that is, that the moment they met in the mine, five years before, was the beginning of their love. They were married with all the pretty pastoral-feudal accessories of a country wedding in England, and spent their honeymoon in the old tower of Carpeggio, where the bride explored the library-room with great curiosity, and was charmed with the old-fashioned figures of the principal people of the town, whom she entertained in what was now again her husband’s own house.