I hastened back to England, leaving money behind me to provide a few comforts for the unfortunate prisoner. I went direct to the little village where Pauline was staying with Priscilla. I could see that she remembered me but as a person in a dream. I had to woo her now. Of our marriage she seemed to have forgotten everything. Though all the old apathy had disappeared, and her mind had once more awakened in her beautiful body, she did not remember that. I despaired at last of winning her, and I determined to bid her good-bye forever. As I sat in the woods with her for the last time, gloom in my heart, I fell into a doze. I was awakened by kisses on my cheeks. I sprang to my feet. In front of me stood Pauline, and looking into her eyes, I saw that she loved me.
She had realised on my first return that I was her husband, but had determined to find out if I loved her. As I said nothing, so she too had remained silent.
"Gilbert," she said, "I have wept, but now I smile. The past is passed. Let the love I bore my brother be buried in the greater love I give my husband. Let us turn our backs on the dark shadows and begin our lives."
Have I more to tell--one thing only. We went to Paris for our real honeymoon. The great war was over, and the Commune had just ended. In the company of a friend I saw some Communists led out to be shot, and among their faces I recognised Macari.
James Fenimore Cooper, born in New Jersey on September 15, 1789, was a hot-headed controversialist of Quaker descent, who, after a restless youth, partly spent at sea, became the earliest conspicuous American novelist. Apart from fiction, Cooper's principal subject was American naval history. Though he made many enemies and lived in turmoil, the novelist had a strain of nobility in his character that is reflected throughout his formal but manly narratives. Love interest rarely rises in his stories beyond a mechanical sentimentality; it is the descriptions of adventure that attract. Nowhere are Fenimore Cooper's vivid powers of description more apparent than in "The Last of the Mohicans," the second in order of the Leatherstocking tales. In the first of the series, "The Pioneers," the Leatherstocking is represented as already past the prime of life, and is gradually being driven out of his beloved forests by the axe and the smoke of the white settler. "The Last of the Mohicans" takes the reader back before this period, to a time when the red man was in his vigour, and was a power to be reckoned with in the east of America. The third of the famous tales is "The Prairie," in which Cooper's picturesque hero is laid in his grave. Despite this, the author resuscitates him in the two remaining volumes--"The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer." Of these five novels, and, as a matter of fact, of all Cooper's works, "The Last of the Mohicans" is regarded as the masterpiece. In it are to be found all the author's virtues, and few of his faults. It is certainly the most popular, having been translated into several languages. It was first published in 1826. Cooper died at Cooperstown, the family locality, on September 14. 1851.