Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/307

Rh Hilda produced the silver case. The girl's eyes glistened. Her hand shook very distressingly. With trembling fingers, as once before, she opened the little casket. Her mother's and her own likeness were there, as when with girlish pleasure she had presented it to her lover.

"Can it be all a dream?" she exclaimed, as she bent over the love-token, and the hectic glow suffused her delicate cheeks. "Those other faces I saw there! Could they be the creation of a diseased imagination?"

She kissed the little casket, bathed it with tears, while the breeze wiped it again with her hair. Quickly and quietly Hilda told her all. What Tom Lord had seen; the part that Malduke had played.

Gwyneth opened her eyes, clasped the silver thing amongst tresses that lay upon her breast, looked up to the soft, cloudless sky, and her eyes sang her Te Deum and Nunc Dimittis in one breath.

"You must see him, dear, and be reconciled," said Hilda, cheerfully. "You will soon get better now."

"Too late—for that," replied the girl, smiling through her tears. "If it could have been, I should have loved this world too much. But tell him, please, I loved him dearly to the last. Ask his forgiveness for my having doubted him. Everything was so against him. I was so alone. Now, if you do not mind," she added after a long pause, "leave me, dear Hilda, to accustom my mind in solitude to this last new joy."

Weeping and embracing they parted. Gwyneth loosened her little boat, whose sail was already set, and as it skimmed over the rippling surface of the waters, the dying girl, who knew at last that she was loved, lay on the white pallet she had placed in the stern for her sick passengers. The little cargo of flowers she had shipped