u love me so much that you do not see how unworthy I am of
you, I cannot give you up again. You are all the world to me."

"But I am only Phebe Marlowe," she said, still doubtfully.

"And I am only Jean Merle," he replied.

Phebe walked down the old familiar lanes with Jean Merle, and returned
to the moorlands alone whilst the sun was still above the horizon. But a
soft west wind had risen, and the hazy heat was gone. She could see the
sun sinking low behind Riversborough, and its tall spires glistened in
the level rays, while the fine cloud of smoke hanging over it this
summer evening was tinged with gold. Her future home lay there, under
the shadow of those spires, and beneath the soft, floating veil
ascending from a thousand hearths. The home Roland Sefton had forfeited
and Felicita had forsaken had become hers. There was deep sadness
mingled with the strange, unanticipated happiness of the present hour;
and Phebe did not seek to put it away from her heart.

CHAPTER XXXI.

LAST WORDS.

Nothing could have delighted Mr. Clifford so much as a marriage between
Jean Merle and Phebe Marlowe. The thought of it had more than once
crossed his mind, but he had not dared to cherish it as a hope. When
Jean Merle told him that night how Phebe had consented to become his
wife, the old man's gladness knew no bounds.

"She is as dear to me as my own daughter," he said, in tremulous
accents; "and now at last I shall have her under the same roof with me.
I shall never be awake in the night again, fearing lest I should miss
her on my death-bed. I should like Phebe to hold my hand in hers as long
as I am conscious of anything in this world. All the remaining years of
my life I shall have you and her with me as my children. God is very
good to me."

But to Felix and Hilda it was a vexation and a surprise to hear that
their Phebe Marlowe, so exclusively their own, was no longer to belong
only to them. They could not tell, as none of us can tell with regard to
our friends' marriages, what she could see in that man to make her
willing to give herself to him. They never cordially forgave Jean
Merle, though in the course of the following years he lavished upon
them magnificent gifts. For once more he became a wealthy man, and stood
high in the estimation of his fellow-townsmen. Upon his marriage with
Phebe, at Mr. Clifford's request, he exchanged his foreign surname for
the old English name of Marlowe, and was made the manage