"Oh, this is a happy hour! It is like the clearing away of dark mist; not alone giving back sunshine to the spot where we stand, but opening out bright prospects all around us." "Then I may tell your uncle that you are mine without doubt or hesitation?" I asked. "Yours, joyfully, gladly," she answered. "Richard, if ever you thought me a coquette, you shall not think me so now; for you shall find me as ready to own my love as I was formerly to declare I never could love. How you ever came to love me, I cannot tell; but I know right well how I came to love you, and I should hate and despise myself if I did not." "I came to love you very easily, dear Bessy," I answered. "It was simply, as I told you one day, I found you out." "And I did not believe you," she replied; "but no wonder, for then I had not found myself out. But there is one thing that puzzles me still, which is, why--for what cause, or on what motive, Mr. William Thornton has so persecuted me and mine. I can easily believe that Robert was moved only by the desire for money, and the habit of fraud; for all the country knows what he was; but as for his father, I have heard people say, who knew him in his youth, that he was a gay, thoughtless, open-hearted man, who spent all he had, and more, with profusion, rather than liberality; yet even at the time of my poor father's death, it would seem he had the same bad feelings towards us, though he concealed them." "It is indeed strange," I replied, remembering the extraordinary vehemence of hatred the old man had displayed towards Bessy herself. "There may be some mystery in the business; but it were as well not to inquire into it too far, dear Bessy. Let us be content that we have frustrated all their schemes against us, without prying into their motives. There is, they say, a skeleton in every house; and we may as well not open the closet door. Something puzzles me also," I added; "but that is of no very fearful nature. It is this: that your uncle Henry did not know all the circumstances of this sad affair between your father and my uncle; for only yesterday he seemed to think you had good grounds for refusing to unite your fate with mine." "I do not think he knows anything but what I wrote to him," replied Bessy. "At the time the duel was fought, he must have been in Europe; for about that time he travelled with my aunt for three years; and the subject has been carefully avoided ever since. Even dear aunt Bab never gave us any particulars. One day, indeed, when warning me not to fall in love with a duellist, she told me my poor father had been killed in a duel. But that was the only allusion to the facts I ever heard till I received these letters. Even Mr. William Thornton, when he used to come to see me often, 'on business,' as he said, never even approached the subject." "It must have been a painful--a dreadful one to him," I answered. "I do not wonder he abstained."