The servant was secured, but Wildred, seeing with his usual quickness that all hope of escape was over, had shot himself through the heart before the officers could reach him. So died a man who had accomplished the death of many another, and through his humble accomplice (who now breaks stones at Portland), and the wretched wife found prisoned in a room upstairs, the secrets of his numerous crimes and the dark House by the Lock were revealed. It was not for many a day after that night's terrible experience that I heard all the truth. What with the two wounds I had received, and the strain of the past few weeks, which had begun to tell upon me at last, for a time I lay in rather a precarious condition. But one morning I woke to consciousness, and found that the beautiful face which had been near me in my dreams was present in reality. Karine and her brother had nursed me through more than a fortnight's illness. Had I been quite myself I would have felt that then was not the time to speak of love to the girl who had endured so much. But the words were uttered before my judgment would let me restrain them, as it so often had done in the first sweet, sad days of our acquaintance. "Forgive me," I said weakly. "I'm a brute. You've been such an angel to me--and I oughtn't to have told you now." "Oughtn't you?" she answered softly. "Do you remember my saying one evening at the Savoy Hotel that there was only one thing in the world which might even then keep me from making a marriage that was horrible to me?" "I remember well," I returned. "I remember everything you ever said to me. Will you tell me what that one thing was?" "I meant _if you had loved me_. Sometimes I--thought you did, but you would never say so. You only asked to be 'my friend.'" "Oh, if I had but known--if I had but dared!" I exclaimed. "I was perishing of love for you from the first night I ever saw your face. Is it too late now? I don't ask to be your friend, I ask to be everything--your lover, and your husband." "And I _give_ you everything," she said. So it came about that the sunshine of happiness drove forth the black shadows which would fain have lingered to haunt us like ghosts from the House by the Lock. THE END Transcriber Notes Spelling and punctuation inaccuracies were silently corrected. Archaic and variable spelling is preserved. Author's punctuation style is preserved. Passages in italics indicated by _underscores_. End of Project Gutenberg's The House by the Lock, by C. N. Williamson