CONTAINS THE CONCLUSION
My reader, I have throughout been perfectly frank with you--too
frank, perhaps. But need I dwell further upon the stirring events of
that night? It is assuredly sufficient to say that the persons
arrested by the police numbered nearly forty, all of whom were
charged with various offences, in addition to that of being found in
an illicit gaming-house. Many of them, old offenders and desperate
characters, notwithstanding the fact that they were outwardly
respectable members of society, in due course received long periods
of imprisonment, Vauquelin receiving a sentence of seven years. But
Julie Fournereau, in view of the information she had given regarding
poor Reggie's death, was dismissed with a fine of two thousand francs
for carrying on the house in question. She has since disappeared
into obscurity. Ulrica arrived in Paris next morning from Genoa, and
was absolutely dumbfounded when we related the whole of the amazing
story. That day, too, proved the happiest in all my life. Need I
relate how, on the following morning, Ernest sought me and begged me
to forgive? Or how, with tears of joy, I allowed him to hold me once
more in his manly arms, as of old, and shower fervent kisses upon my
face? No. If I were to begin to relate the joys that had now come
to me, I should far exceed the space of a single volume. It is
enough that you, reader, to whom I have made confession, should know
that within a fortnight we all returned to London, and that while
Ulrica became engaged to Gerald, and soon afterwards married him,
with the old man's heartiest approval, Ernest again asked me to
become his wife.
At Kensington Church, amid great _éclat_, within a month of our
arrival back in town, my happiness broke into full flower.
Ulrica tells me, in the privacy of her little blue boudoir in Eaton
Square, that she is no longer world-weary, living only for
excitement, as in the fevered days gone by, but that her life is full
of a peaceful happiness that cannot be surpassed. Nevertheless, I
cannot really bring myself to believe that she is any happier than I
am with Ernest in our pretty home at Hyde Park Gate, for the
estrangement has rendered him all the more dear to me, and we are
indeed supremely content in each other's perfect love.
Mrs. Thorne, poor Reggie's mother, has returned to Hampshire, fully
satisfied at having cleared up the mystery surrounding her son's
tragic death; while old Benjamin Keppel, late of Johannesburg, and
now of Park Lane and Ulverton Towers, in Hertfordshire, still spends
his winters in rather lonely grandeur in his great villa amid the
palms outside Nice, working in secret at his ivory-turning, and
giving at intervals those princely entertainments for which he has
become so famous in the cosmopolitan society which suns itself upon
the Riviera.
As for Ernest and myself, we have not visited Nice since. We prefer
Cairo for the winter, with a trip up to Luxor and Assouan, for we
retain a far too vivid recollection of those dark days of doubt,
desperation and despair, when it was our strange and tragic lot to be
so darkly associated with The Gamblers.
THE END
_Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey._