“Yes. On my visit to the prison I learned that Jesse Powers was the man who gave you the silk.”
“I certainly told you nothing of the kind!” he exclaimed.
“No, but I found it out. I am a better detective than you think,” she said laughing. “Sit down here and I will tell you all about it.”
John was surprised and laughed at her shrewdness, as she told how she had arrived at his concealed knowledge, and described her interview with his false friend.
“I have not been very much deceived in Jesse Powers,” he said. “But I felt that it was not for me to expose him. I owe him a debt which honor forced me to repay in the way I did.”
A half-hour afterward the two happy lovers sought the presence of the father and brother, who were still where Jennie had left them.
It was an embarrassing task for Jennie to introduce her lover to a father who was almost a stranger, although she had felt toward him the impulses of natural love.
But Will took all the trouble of the introduction off of her hands.
“Ha! I’ve caught you now, Jennie,” he cried, with a quizzical laugh. “This is the young man that I wanted you to throw overboard. Father, this is our Jennie’s beau, and a first-rate fellow, you can bet!”
Mr. Somers looked with some doubt from one to the other.
“Will is right,” said Jennie, in a low tone, and deeply blushing. “Mr. Elkton and I have been engaged for some time. I wish now to present him to my new father.”
“And I hope he may prove a dutiful son,” said Elkton, as he warmly grasped Mr. Somers’s extended hand.
“I do not know you,” said the father, with a happy smile, “but I trust in the choice of my daughter, and in the discretion of Mr. Leonard.”
“And in Mr. Elkton’s face,” cried Will. “That’s a passport to honesty.”
“Thank you,” said John, turning and offering his hand to the impulsive boy. “You have placed me under obligations to live out the promise of my face.”
“Told Jennie once I was bound to cut you out,” said Will. “Guess now though that I’ll let you have her. She’s a good girl. Make much of her.”
“She’s all the world to me,” said John, turning and taking the hand of the blushing girl.
It was a happy family party which time and fortune had thus reunited, after a life of many vicissitudes, and it is time we should leave them, and seek other less happy inmates of our story.