husband! all this is yours. Oh, how happy I am!"

The next moment she burst into tears on the shoulder to which she was
clinging.

"What is the matter?" demanded Thurstane in some alarm; for he did not
know that women can tremble and weep with gladness, and he thought that
surely his wife was sick if not deranged.

"What! don't you guess it?" she asked, drawing back with a little more
calmness, and looking tenderly into his puzzled eyes.

"You don't mean--?"

"Yes, darling."

"It can't be that--?"

"Yes, darling."

He began to comprehend the trick that had been played upon him, although
as yet he could not fully credit it. What mainly bewildered him was that
Clara, whom he had always supposed to be as artless as a child--Clara,
whom he had cared for as an elder and a father--should have been able to
keep a secret and devise a plot and carry out a mystification.

"Great ---- Scott!" he gasped in his stupefaction, using the name of the
then commander-in-chief for an oath, as officers sometimes did in those
days.

"Yes, yes, yes," laughed and chattered Clara. "Great Scott and great
Thurstane! All yours. Three hundred thousand. Half a million. A million. I
don't know how much. All I know is that it is all yours. Oh, my darling!
oh, my darling! How I have fooled you! Are you angry with me? Say, are you
angry? What will you do to me?"

We must excuse Thurstane for finding no other chastisement than to squeeze
her in his arms and choke her with kisses. Next he held her from him, set
her down upon a sofa, fell back a pace and stared at her much as if she
were a totally new discovery, something in the way of an arrival from the
moon. He was in a state of profound amazement at the dexterity with which
she had taken his destiny out of his own hands into hers, without his
knowledge. He had not supposed that she was a tenth part so clever. For
the first time he perceived that she was his match, if indeed she were not
the superior nature; and it is a remarkable fact, though not a dark one if
one looks well into it, that he respected her the more for being too much
for him.

"It beats Hannibal," he said at last. "Who would have expected such
generalship in you? I am as much astonished as if you had turned into a
knight in armor. Well, how much it has saved me! I should have hesitated
and been miserable; and I should have married you all the same; and then
been ashamed of marrying money, and had it rankle in me for year