‘Hush!’ he said, drawing her to him. ‘When a man’s eyes are opened first to the thought that another man has gone off express to rob him of his jewel, do you think he pauses to be reasonable?’ and then they looked at each other and were silent, there being more expression in that than in speech. ‘But the jewel was no jewel till yesterday,’ said Mary, making the kind of objection which women love to make, ‘and who knows but it may be paste to-morrow?’ ‘My dear,’ said Ben, ‘my only woman in the world! might not a man have been beguiled to follow a Will-o’-the-wisp till he cursed and hated such lights, and chose darkness instead,--and then all at once wake up to see that his moon had risen, and that the night was safe and sweet as day?’ I suppose it was the only bit of poetry which Ben Renton was ever guilty of in his life; and it was perfectly successful. And they went on and continued their walk to the beech-tree. Mary’s eyes were blind with sweet tears; but then, what did it matter? was not he there to be eyes to her, through the winding of the tender morning path? And as they reached the trees, the sunshine burst into the wood all at once with something like a shout of triumph. If it was not a shout, it came to precisely the same thing, and caught a branch here and a twig there, and made it into burnished gold, and lit up the far distance and cloistered shade into all the joyous animation and moving stir of life. ‘Must you go now?’ Mary said, clinging to him a little closer, ‘must it still be secret? is no one to see you now?’ ‘I must still go away,’ he said, ‘no help for that, Mary; but in the meantime I am going home with you to tell them all about it. I shall still catch my ship if I go by the next train.’ He was received with subdued consternation by the household, which jumped instantly to the conclusion that something had happened; but there is an instinct in the domestic mind which is almost infallible in such matters; and before Mrs. Renton had even been told of the unexpected arrival of her son, Davison had said to the housekeeper, ‘He’s come down at the last to settle it all with Miss Mary. Now didn’t I tell you?’ and Willis had recorded his opinion that, on the whole, there wasn’t nothing to say again it. ‘A little bit of money never comes amiss,’ he said; ‘but she was used bad in the will, never to have no compensation. And, on the whole, I agrees with Ben.’