* * * * *
And yet Anne looked back once. There was just the tall, stark shaft, and
on it "John Charteris." The thing was ominous and vast, all colored like
wet gravel, save where the sunlight tipped it with clean silver very
high above their reach.
"Come," she quickly said to Rudolph Musgrave; "come, for I am afraid."
VI
And are we then to leave them with glad faces turned to that new day
wherein, above the ashes of old errors and follies and mischances and
miseries, they were to raise the structure of such a happiness as earth
rarely witnesses? Would it not be, instead, a grateful task more fully
to depicture how Rudolph Musgrave's love of Anne won finally to its
reward, and these two shared the evening of their lives in tranquil
service of unswerving love come to its own at last?
Undoubtedly, since the espousal of one's first love--by oneself--is a
phenomenon rarely encountered outside of popular fiction, it would be a
very gratifying task to record that Anne and Rudolph Musgrave were
married that autumn; that subsequently Lichfield was astounded by the
fervor of their life-long bliss; that Colonel and (the second) Mrs.
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