Lord Level, up and dressed, lay on a sofa in his bedroom in the afternoon. Blanche sat on a footstool beside him. Her face was hidden upon her husband's knee and she was crying bitter tears. "Shall you ever forgive me, Archibald?" He was smiling quietly. "Some husbands might say no." "You don't know how miserable I have been." "Don't I! But how came you to fall into such notions at first, Blanche? To suspect me of ill at all?" "It was that Mrs. Page Reid who was with us at Pisa. She said all sorts of things." "Ah!" "_Won't_ you forgive me, Archibald?" "Yes, upon condition that you trust me fully in future. Will you, love?" he softly whispered. She could not speak for emotion. "And the next time you have a private grievance against me, Blanche, tell it out plainly," he said, as he held her to him and gave her kiss for kiss. "My darling, yes. But I shall never have another." CHAPTER XIII. CONCLUSION. I, Charles Strange, took up this story at its commencement, and I take it up now at its close. * * * * * It was a lovely day at the end of summer, in the year following the events recorded in the last chapter, and we were again at Marshdale House. The two individuals who had chiefly marred the peace of one or another of us in the past were both gone where disturbance is not. Poor Tom Heriot was mouldering in his grave near to that in which his father and mother lay, not having been discovered by the police or molested in any way; and the afflicted Italian lad had died soon after he was taken to his native land. Mr. Hill had warned Nina Sparlati that, in all probability, he would not live long. Mrs. Brightman, I may as well say it here, had recovered permanently; recovered in all ways, as we hoped and believed. The long restraint laid upon her by her illness had effected the cure that nothing else might have been able to effect, and re-established the good habits she had lost. But Miss Brightman was dead; she had not lived to come home from Madeira, and the whole of her fortune was left to Annabel. "So you can live where you please now and go in for grandeur," Arthur Lake said to me and my wife. "All in good time," laughed Annabel; "I am not yet tired of Essex Street." And now we had come down in the sunny August weather when the courts were up, to stay at Marshdale. You might be slow to recognise it, though. Recalling the picture of Marshdale House as it was, and looking at it now, many would have said it could not be the same.