The close of the year saw us married, Bob Asher acting as groomsman with great _éclat_. Sir ---- ---- took me as a partner, and for a month I went with my bride to Baden. There, one day, at the _table d'hôte_, she found herself face to face with her own parents. The alarm, the consternation, the scene, proved frightful; but all ended in a complete reconciliation, and Christmas-day saw us all happy at Chalcot Park, and I felt, on seeing my blooming Gertrude, in all the splendour of her beauty, opening the yearly ball, that I could with a whole heart forgive even her father for his pride and fury on the day that saw us separated. CLARE THORNE'S TEMPTATION. CHAPTER I. "After all that has been, and is no more--after all that has passed between us, but never can pass again, why are we fated to meet--and _here_?" wailed the girl, Clare Thorne, in her heart (for though a wedded wife, she was but a girl yet, being barely in her twentieth year), as she suddenly saw, with strangely-mingled emotions of joy, fear, and sorrow, the face of Fred Wilmot. It was on a Sunday morning early, ere the East Indian sun was quite up, and in the cantonment church of Mirzapatam, a few miles from the Jumna, that this unexpected recognition took place. The girl heard not the voice of the preacher, her husband Cecil Thorne, the chaplain of the station; she forgot for a time where she was, and her thoughts fled--fled away from that strange-looking cantonment church, with its long punkahs pulled by nut-brown coolies (who watched with amazement "the white man's poojah") moving alike over the head of the preacher and his congregation, when even at that early hour the air was breathless, and when the ring-necked paraquets, green pigeons, and other birds twittered in and out at the open jalousies--fled home, while her heart seemed to stand still--home to a quaint old English church in beautiful Kent, with its low broad Norman arches, its stained glass windows, its sculptured effigies, above which old iron helmets hung, and spiders spun their dusty webs undisturbed--for there it had been that she had last seen the face she now looked on, breathlessly, the face of her first love and _then_ betrothed, Fred Wilmot, ere misfortune separated them, and a cruel fate sent her to Central India, to become the wife of the Reverend Cecil Thorne. On the preceding day a new regiment had marched in, but she knew not till that moment at the morning sermon, that among its officers was Lieutenant Frederick Wilmot, till she saw him with his men, in his braided white kalkee uniform, carrying under one arm his pith helmet, encircled by a blue veil, and looking with his lithe form, embrowned face, dark grey eyes and heavy moustache, handsomer than ever, and so unlike her husband, Cecil Thorne, in his flowing white Indian cassock.