"I shan't do it again, but I shouldn't have had this perfectly stunning time if I hadn't, should I?"
So it was in her life. She had had joy through her mistakes. She and her Love had been alone in the Great Sea of Time battling with the waves as best they could.
Nothing else mattered. They might be waifs on that sea, but they were together.
She slipped to her knees and watched the sun rise. Over how many mistakes, how many wasted minutes and opportunities and lives!
Wasted? No--not wasted. Even mistakes had their appointed place. Even the old man who had made the castle over yonder a spider's-web of evil was part of the Great Plan.
Slowly the light grew. The cottages below in the tiny fishing village began to send up thin blue threads of smoke. The figure of a man or a woman began to pass along the narrow causeway. And someone came up the steps towards her cottage, then paused, seeing her.
"Ye'll be Mistress Marsden likely," he said, "for I've no seen ye before. There's a saxpence tae pay, but ye can gie it to the lassie for me till I come back."
The postman handed her a letter as he spoke and went on his way, for his round was a long one.
She looked at the envelope curiously. The original address was almost undecipherable, being defaced with innumerable new ones, or brief notices, "Gone away;" "Try so and so."
Still the name was hers. A bill likely, sent to her old London address and forwarded to the Crimea and back again. Twice, so it seemed to her as she tried to decipher the postmarks.
Then she opened it, noting with a vague spasm of memory that a curious embossed presentment of foxhounds in full cry ran right across the flap. Where had she seen that device before?
The writing too was vaguely familiar. The writing of a person with brains, but strangely shaky and irregular:
"Since my son Marmaduke has chosen to deprive me of the possibility of an heir by dying--not even on the field of battle--out at Varna, I return the enclosed. I don't know why I kept it. To have a hold over the young man at bottom, I expect. Perhaps for other reasons. One doesn't often meet women of your description. Anyhow, I haven't.
"You can now claim your position and dowry, which my d----d cousin can very well afford to pay.