“Your affectionate Brother, “JACK KEENE.”
“Jack tells me of the mistake,” she whispered. “And now I understand. He tells me too that I am to comfort you.”
She held out her hands, and he took them into his strong grasp.
“Sweet Polly,” he said, in a voice which shook a little despite his best efforts, “you wrote to me once a letter which was signed, ‘Yours faithfully, and till Death.’ That letter I have never parted with since the day it reached me—not even when I feared that I had indeed cause for doubt. Can you say those words to me once again?”
Polly lifted her head and looked straight into his eyes.
“I am yours, Captain Ivor, always and ever, as long as life shall last,” she uttered very clearly.
Twelve months later Denham stood in the passage of the little London house, which for more than eleven months had been his home and Polly’s. He had wasted no time in making her his wife. He had but a year, he urged, and surely the waiting had lasted long enough.
So Mrs. Bryce was obliged to forego her hopes of a grand and fashionable wedding, to which all the quality should be invited for the display of resplendent costumes. Denham was neither in health nor in spirits for such a function, and Polly’s one wish was to do what would give him pleasure.
They had been married quietly less than three weeks after his return, and Polly had done her best to comfort him, and to win him back once more to strength.
All that year he had not left her. But now he was free, and duty called him to the Peninsula, where the long struggle was being carried on between the Army of Wellington and the Army of Napoleon. The Spaniards with Wellington, as with Moore, did little at any time beyond throwing hindrances in the way of the British. Roy Baron had gone out many months before.
It was hard work for Denham to say good-bye, not only to Polly, with her sweet brave face, but to the tiny boy, with Polly’s own eyes of brown velvet, who had come but a very short time before to gladden their home. Denham bent to kiss the tiny sleeper, then turned again to Polly.
“It will not be for long,” she whispered. “I may think that, may I not? Peace must surely come some day.”
“Not yet, dear heart,” he answered; and she knew well that, acutely though he felt leaving her, he yet longed to share the fight with those who strove for England and for Freedom—that fight from which he had been so many years debarred.