“What will I do, my darling?” he softly asked, taking her hand. “Begin anew from this moment to love and cherish, honour and protect you unto death. You are my wife. I took you a beautiful child, innocent of the world. If you have failed in the least, I have failed. If you have stumbled in the dark even in your thought, I will lift you up in my arms and soothe you as a mother would her babe. If you should fall into the bottomless pit, into the pit and down to the lowest depths of hell I would go, and lift you in the arms of my love. To break the tie that binds us is unthinkable. It has passed into the infinite. Not only are our souls one in a little boy’s grave, but there is something so absorbing, so interwoven with the hidden things of nature in our union that I defy all the fiends in perdition to break it. Love is eternal. And your love for me was the great fixed thing in my life like my faith in the living God!” “Oh, John, you are breaking my heart now, when I think that I doubted your love! I could have brooked your anger, but this overwhelms me!” “It has always been my character,” he gravely said. “Then I have never known you until now,”--and in a moment she was sobbing on his breast, the years had rolled back, and they were in the sweet springtime of life again. CHAPTER XVI--THE END OF A MODERN VILLAIN TWO days after McLeod’s flight from Hambright the press despatches flashed from New York a startling two-column account of the attempted assassination of the Hon. Allan McLeod, the Republican leader of North Carolina, in the terrific campaign in progress, and that he was compelled to flee from the state to save his life. Gaston was elected Governor by the largest majority ever given a candidate for that office in the history of North Carolina. McLeod was promptly rewarded for his long career of villainy by an appointment as our Ambassador to one of the Republics of South America, and the Senate at once confirmed him. The salary attached to his office was $15,000, and his dream of a life of ease and luxury had come at last. For six months he had been quietly going to Boston paying the most ardent court to Miss Susan Walker, whom he had met at her college at Independence. She was a matured spinster now appproaching sixty years of age, and worth $5,000 000 in her own name. He had easy sailing from the first. He joined her church in Boston, after a brilliant profession of religion that moved Miss Walker to tears, for he had told her it was her love that had opened his eyes. And it was true. McLeod timed his last visit to Boston so that he arrived the day the city was ringing with the sensation of his attempted assassination, and the desperate fight he was making to uphold law and order in the South.