"Dear love, I am ashamed of my happiness," said Roderick tenderly. "I have been so weak and unworthy. I gave away my hopes of bliss in one foolishly soft moment, to gratify my mother's dying wish--a wish that had been dinned into my ear the last years of her life--and I have done nothing but repent my folly ever since. Can you forgive me, Violet? I shall never forgive myself." "Let the past be like a dream that we have dreamt. It will make the future seem so much the brighter." "Yes." And then under the blue August sky, fearless and unabashed, these happy lovers gave each other the kiss of betrothal. "What am I to do with you?" Vixen asked laughingly. "I ought to go home to Les Tourelles." "Don't you think you might take me with you? I am your young man now, you know. I hope it is not a case of 'no followers allowed.'" "I'm afraid Miss Skipwith will feel disappointed in me. She thought I was going to have a mission." "A mission!" "Yes; that I was going for theology. And for it all to end in my being engaged to be married! It seems such a commonplace ending, does it not?" "Decidedly. As commonplace as the destiny of Adam and Eve, whom God joined together in Eden. Take me back to Les Tourelles, Vixen. I think I shall be able to manage Miss Skipwith." They left the battlements, and descended the narrow stairs, and went side by side, through sunlit fields and lanes, to the old Carolian manor house, happy with that unutterable, immeasurable joy which belongs to happy love, and to love only; whether it be the romantic passion of a Juliet leaning from her balcony, the holy bliss of a mother hanging over her child's cradle, or the sober affection of the wife who has seen the dawn and close of a silver wedding and yet loves on with love unchangeable--a monument of constancy in an age of easy divorce. The distance was long; but to these two the walk was of the shortest. It was as if they trod on flowers or airy cloud, so lightly fell their footsteps on the happy earth. What would Miss Skipwith say? Vixen laughed merrily at the image of that cheated lady. "To think that all my Egyptian researches should end in--Antony!" she said, with a joyous look at her lover, who required to be informed which Antony she meant. "I remember him in Plutarch," he said. "He was a jolly fellow." "And in Shakespeare." "_Connais pas_," said Rorie. "I've read some of Shakespeare's plays, of course, but not all. He wrote too much." It was five o'clock in the afternoon when they arrived at Les Tourelles. They had loitered a little in those sunny lanes, stopping to look seaward through a gap in the hedge, or to examine a fern which was like the ferns of Hampshire. They had such a world of lovers' nonsense to say to each other, such confessions of past unhappiness, such schemes of future bliss.