"When I reached this stage of my exalted sensibilities I was nearly crazed. There had been no witness of our marriage except the minister, and he was already dead. We had been married at the country parsonage of an old retired minister beyond Oxford church, on the road from Frankford town, as we drove out one afternoon, and I prevailed with my conscientious wife to yield her scruples to our heart's necessity. 'Great God!' I thought aloud--for none could hear me there--'how dreadfully that secret marriage will compromise my wife! Who will believe us without a witness of what I must assert--a story so improbable that I would not believe it myself? I must say that I married my wife secretly from my father's house, confessing deceit for both of us, and with Agnes's religious professions, a sin in the church's estimation. If there could be an excuse for me, the strict people of Kensington will accord none to her. They will charge on her maturer mind the whole responsibility, paint her in the colors of ingratitude, and find in her greatest poverty the principal motive. Yes, they may be wicked enough to say she compassed the death of my father by my hands, to get his property.'
"I had proceeded thus far when the terror of our position became luminous like the coming fire on a prairie, which shows everything but a way of escape. 'Where is your father?' they would ask of me in Kensington. 'He is drowned.' 'How drowned?' 'He shot himself.' 'Why did he shoot himself?' 'Because I had married his ward.' 'But his partner is gone too.' 'He is murdered.' 'Why murdered?' 'Because he interceded for me.' 'Where is your witness?' 'He has disappeared.' I saw the wild improbability of this tale, and thought of past notorious quarrels with my father ended by my voluntary absence. There were but two points that seemed to stick in my nervous mind: 'It never would do to tell our marriage at that moment, and I must find that sailor, who might still be living.'"
"He found me, sure enough, begorra!" exclaimed Mike Donovan, giving the relief of laughter to that intense narrative.
"Cowardly as you may call my resolution, gentlemen, it was all the resolution I had left. To partake of the inheritance left me by both partners in our house I feared to do. 'Let us do the penance of suspicious separation,' I said to Agnes; 'as your husband I command you to let me go!' She yielded like a wife, and stood my hostage in Kensington for all those melancholy months. I had just learned the place for which the bark which passed us on that eventful night had cleared, when the two bullet-pierced bodies were discovered in the ice. That night I sailed for Wilmington, North Carolina. When I arrived there the bark was gone for the Mediterranean, but I heard of my sailor, wounded, in her hospital. I sailed from Charleston for Cuba, and from Cuba to Cadiz, and thence I embarked for Trieste. At Trieste I found the ship, but Donovan had sailed for Liverpool. From Liverpool I tracked him to the River Plate, and thence to Panama. You will ask how I lived all those months? Ask him."