“Dearest Stella,” he said, taking her hand, reseating her, and standing, leaning over her chair, “let me be now, as always, perfectly frank with you. First, let me repeat that your painful story has made no difference in my feelings and purposes toward you, nor, as a matter of course, in our present and future relations. I do not gainsay, dear Stella, that your premature marriage was a great wrong; but I remember that you were an inexperienced child in the hands of intriguing and insinuating people, with whom you were not prepared to cope! I do not either deny that your concealment of your previous marriage, first from your parents, and afterward from your affianced husband, was a greater wrong; but I can easily understand how, in the first case, the haughty severity of Sir Parke, and the sensitive pride of Lady Morelle, should alike have frightened you from making the revelation; and still better can I sympathize with your shrinking reluctance to confide such a secret to me; and feel how much more difficult every day of delay must have rendered such a confession; and through all, how your refined and sensitive mind, brooding day and night over your misfortune, should have come to exaggerate both the magnitude of the fault and the difficulty of concealing it; and, finally, my victorious Stella, I can appreciate the triumph of principle in your present disclosure. Come to my heart, sweet Stella!” he said, opening his arms and gathering her to his bosom. “Not until this hour, dear Stella, have I fully won your heart,” he whispered, dropping his face caressingly upon the silky black ringlets of her bowed head—“not until this hour have I fully won your heart!” “But now I am all your own. Oh, my lord! my lord!—all your own—heart, soul, and spirit!” she said, in a voice of thrilling tenderness. “I had that blighting secret, that I dared not lay on the strong breast of the father that gave me life, nor on the tender bosom of the mother that bore me, but which at last I confide to your own great heart, and you receive the trust, and gather me within the fold of your powerful arms, and have no word of bitter reproach for my sin, but only a tender compassion for my sufferings; no humbling pity for my weakness, but only a noble sympathy with my struggles, and praise for my late—too late victory!” “Reproach for _you_, my wounded dove? my gentle, patient sufferer? Nay, rest on my bosom; rest sweetly here awhile,” he murmured, smoothing her hair with his hand. “Oh, the blessed relief, the sweet, sweet repose, the measureless content, I find on this sustaining breast!” she breathed, in a deep sigh of deliverance and rest. “Would for your own sake, beloved, that you had sooner laid the burden of your secret sorrow upon your promised husband’s faithful heart—that you might have sooner found the relief he can give you, gentle and beautiful Stella.”