When she had left the room, the captain found himself alone with his young wife and their little one.  Again her head was on his shoulder, his arm about her waist.

“My husband, my dear, dear husband,” she murmured, “I am so glad to have you here!  I cannot tell you how I longed for you when the children were so ill.  Oh, if we could only be together always, as Lester and Elsie, Edward and Zoe, are!”

“My love, my life,” he said in low tones, tremulous with feeling, “what if I should tell you that your wish is already accomplished?”

She gave him a glance of astonishment and incredulity.

“It is even so:  I mean all I have said,” he answered to the look.  “I have sent in my resignation:  it has been accepted, and I have come home—­no, I have come here to make a home for you and my children, hoping to live in it with you and them for the rest of my days.”

Her face had grown radiant.  “Oh! can it be true?” she cried, half under her breath; for even in her glad surprise, the thought of her suffering babe and its critical condition was present with her:  “are we not to be forced apart again in a few days or weeks? not to go on spending more than half our lives at a distance from each other?”

“It is quite true, my darling,” he answered, then went on to tell, in a few brief sentences, how it had come about.

“It cost me a struggle to give up the service,” he said in conclusion; “and perhaps I might not have decided as I did, but for the thought that, if I should be needed by my country at some future day, I could offer her my services; and the thought that, at present, wife and children needed me more, probably, than she.  I felt that Lulu, in particular, needed my oversight and training; that the task of bringing her up was too difficult, too trying, to be left to other hands than those of her father; and I feel that still more sensibly since hearing of this day’s doings,” he added in a tone of heartfelt sorrow.

“I think you are right,” Violet said.  “She is more willing to submit to your authority than to that of anybody else; as, indeed, she ought to be:  and in a home that she will feel is really her own, her father’s house, and with him constantly at hand, to watch over, and help her to correct her faults, there is hope, I think, that she may grow to be all you desire.”

“Thank you, love, for saying it,” he responded with emotion.  “I could not blame you if now you thought her utterly irreclaimable.”

“No, oh, no!” she answered earnestly.  “I have great hopes of her, with her father at hand to help her in the struggle with her temper; for I am sure she does struggle against it; and I must acknowledge, that, for months past, she has been as good and lovable a child as one could desire.  I don’t know a more lovable one than she is when her temper does not get the better of her; and, as Gracie says, whenever it does, ’she gets sorry very soon.’”